George Orwell

Written by Orwell on 17 April 1940 for Twentieth Century Authors

Excerpt: The shortlists for the 2011 Orwell Prize - which is dedicated to rewarding those who come closest to achieving George Orwell's ambition "to make political writing into an art" - have been announced. They are divided into three categories - books, journalism and blogs - and each winner can expect a prize of £3,000. So, let's begin with the six shortlisted books, selected from a record entry of 213: Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (Allen Lane); Oliver Bullough, Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys Among the Defiant People of the Caucasus (Penguin); Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal (Fig Tree); Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (Atlantic Books); Afsaneh Moqadam, Death to the Dictator! (Bodley Head); and D.R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold MacMillan (Chatto & Windus)

Excerpt: Shades of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" ... The information revealed this week about user location data being recorded and stored by iPhones and iPads made me think of George Orwell's 1949 classic. I admit (I promise I'm not a conspiracy theorist), this isn't the first time I've thought we're way too close for comfort to the social structure portrayed in the book. In the novel, the world is at perpetual war, government surveillance is pervasive and there is incessant public mind control. Sound familiar? I found Orwell's story scary when I first read it as a teenager. I remember thinking, "Why would people ever let government invade their privacy and take over their lives that way?" It's even scarier now I've witnessed how easily people's lives can be invaded over time.

Excerpt: IN THE late 1940s, George Orwell wrote his nightmarish novel 1984, depicting a future world where an all-seeing but unseen tyrant, Big Brother, ruled over his citizens by watching their every move. In this paranoid dystopia, surveillance was purely a ''top-down'' affair, a government tool for controlling the hapless masses: privacy was a crime, the Thought Police punished dissent and history was rewritten daily for political ends. More than half a century later, it is worth considering how Orwell's fictional prediction weighs up against reality. If Big Brother's gaze dominated that imagined future, who's watching over us now?

Excerpt: Adaptation of Orwell's 1984 draws on high-tech tools to create oppressive mood. The ministries of Peace, Plenty, Love and Truth request that you refrain from attending a new stage version of George Orwell's 1984. Frankly, citizens here in Oceania risk vaporization just thinking about this assault on all our happy and prosperous lives. Every year it gets easier to see Orwell's point about being wary of surveillance. Andy Thompson isn't out to stoke some streak of paranoia in people, but his new theatrical adaptation of 1984 tries to be as accurate as possible in conveying the fear and anxiety in a world where the thought police are keeping an eye on your mind. "None of the stage or film adaptations I've seen satisfied me fully," says Thompson. "In some cases they messed around with the plot to the point that I, as a fan of the book, felt quite frustrated and angry, and in other cases, for example the Hurt/Burton version [a film starring John Hurt and Richard Burton], I felt the stakes were kind of low. I didn't get that sense of fear or terror."

Around 50 complete and free essays by George Orwell are available on this page. Site hosted in Canada where Orwell's work is in the public domain.

Excerpt: Andy Thompson is a purist when it comes to George Orwell's work. But he's long been an adventurist when it comes to presenting stories in tech-savvy ways. That's why Thompson's adaptation of Orwell's prophetic novel 1984 will be a massive multimedia production that incorporates video projections for shadings and texture and live and prerecorded video on 13 high-definition flat screens. The TV screens will animate the surveillance tools of the government in Orwell's dystopian world in the stage production of 1984, which runs March 24 to April 3 at the Cultch. "This particular story requires that the telescreen be a real and palpable and frightening character in the story," said Thompson, the artistic and managing director of The Virtual Stage theatre company. "I was not only excited about the idea of doing this novel on stage, but also the idea of bringing this character to life."

1984 will play at the Venture Theatre in Billings from March 11 - 19, 2011. Based on the novel by George Orwell, the production is directed by Patrick Wilson. "Based on George Orwell book 1984 imagines a world where people fear that their opinion cannot be expressed freely, where leaders are not held accountable for their deceptions, where perpetual war is waged against an unseen enemy; a world where Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, and War is Peace. "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe that something resembling it could arrive. The moral to be drawn from the dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you." -George Orwell."

Excerpt: From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

Excerpt: For my part, while I knew Barcelona had many layers of history - from Roman times through the Middle Ages - when my wife and I made our first visit in 2010, I wanted to see the shrines of the civil war. George Orwell, arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century, recorded the incredible scenes of 1936 and 1937 in Homage to Catalonia, his contemporaneous account of the workers' takeover of Barcelona.

Attorney whose client owns the television and film rights to the novel "1984" had feared infringement with Orwellian theme. From Chicago Tribune.

Excerpt: Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language - so the argument runs - must inevitably share in the general collapse.

Novelist Robert Harris discusses Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell's 1984. BBC - Faulks on Fiction.

Excerpt: Odds are you will be monitored today - many times over. Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are not the only devices tracking you. Inexpensive, ever-watchful digital sensors are now ubiquitous. They are in laptop webcams, video-game motion sensors, smartphone cameras, utility meters, passports and employee ID cards. Step out your front door and you could be captured in a high-resolution photograph taken from the air or street by Google or Microsoft, as they update their respective mapping services. Drive down a city thoroughfare, cross a toll bridge, or park at certain shopping malls and your license plate will be recorded and time-stamped. Several developments have converged to push the monitoring of human activity far beyond what George Orwell imagined. Low-cost digital cameras, motion sensors and biometric readers are proliferating just as the cost of storing digital data is decreasing. The result: the explosion of sensor data collection and storage.

Complete novel. Site hosted in Canada where George Orwell's work is in the public domain.

Excerpt: After being neglected for decades, the birthplace of George Orwell, the legendary British author of cult classics like "Animal Farm" and "1984", is set for renovation as the Bihar government has issued a notification declaring it as a protected site. Motihari magistrate Narmadeshwar Lal told IANS over telephone that the government notification has made it clear that Orwell's birthplace has been enlisted by the art and culture department for protection. "The district administration has begun renovation work," Lal said.

Excerpt: January 25, 2011 The municipal government of northwest China's Urumqi plans to put the entire city under surveillance by installing tens of thousands of cameras in the city hit by deadly riots 18 months ago, officials said Tuesday. Nearly 17,000 cameras were installed in the city last year, enabling police to monitor an additional 2,109 public venues, head of the municipal government's information technology office Wang Yannian said.

Excerpt: Christopher Hitchens may, in his words, be "shackled to my own corpse" - the great polemicist was diagnosed with throat cancer last year - but he still cares about the little things in life. Over the weekend, he penned a 1,000-word treatise for the American website Slate entitled How To Make a Decent Cup of Tea. According to Hitch, it is "virtually impossible in the United States" - his home for the last 30 years - "to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to". Hitch's main gripe is that Americans seem to offer only cups of tepid water, with teabags served separately. Tea drunk like this, he says, is not worthy of the name - and is "best thrown away". But all is not lost. Nothing if not constructive, Hitchens has provided us with a list of guiding principles, which, if followed closely, will surely revive the art of tea-making in the US. The most important of these is making sure that boiling water is added to the teabags. "Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter." Next, Hitch insists that your teapot be pre-warmed - and that your mug be cylindrical. As for milk, "use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste. And do not put the milk in the cup first."

Excerpt: When the frieze of George Orwell's face disappeared from a Hampstead plaque it looked like he would be confined to Room 101, never to be seen again. But in death it seems you can't keep the writer down and out in London for very long and fans have now announced plans to erect a new plaque in his honour in nearby Kilburn. It will go up on the site of the flat in Mortimer Crescent where Orwell moved in 1942 with his mother and sister for two years. It was where he wrote his satirical masterpiece Animal Farm before he was forced to abandon his home when it was reduced to rubble in the Blitz.

Excerpt: While bumming around Spain a few years ago, my son and a friend began discussing the inadequacy of the adjective "Orwellian." The classic definition, supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary, is well known: Orwellian "...portrays a form of totalitarian state seen by him as arising naturally out of the political circumstances of his time." The usage is ubiquitous. Earlier this month, the conservative classicist Victor Davis Hanson was fulminating about the environmental movement's "Orwellian metamorphosizing nomenclature" on his Web site. But my son and his pal correctly noted that George Orwell's life and writings embraced such a diversity of experience that "Orwellian" could mean many other things. "Orwellian" could describe someone working as a dishwasher in a filthy kitchen ("Down and Out in Paris and London"), or a member of Britain's pre-World War II middle class ("Keep the Aspidistra Flying"), or a solider shot through the neck while peeping above a trench who lives to write about it.