George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) was born on

George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) was born on the 25th of  June 1903 in India in a Anglo-Indian family, his father was a civil servant.

In 1922, he joined the imperial Indian police but he resigned in 1927. At this time, he went to Europe and there he started to write. In his books (like Down and out in London and Paris) he describes the misery in London and Paris from his own experience in thoses capitals. He also participated in the civil Spanish war in 1936. During that period, he wrote Homage to Catalonia where he describes the communist actions and the big opposition between the different political camps in Spain. After that, he came back to England where he found a job as a speaker for the BBC. In 1943, he became director of the newspaper “The tribune”, then special envoy of The Observer in Germany and France in 1945 where he was responsible for observing politics. Suffering from tuberculosis, he continued to write and he published Animal farm, a Stalinist political satire, depicting animals taking power from the hands of humans. His major work is the book 1984, written in 1949 where he denounces political and social systems with no liberty. The novel will be translated into more than 60 languages, and his description of a totalitarist world is now considered as a timeless classic of British literature with the famous "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. "

George Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London clinic in 1950.

Hélène Chappot - TL