OUR STORE IS CLOSED ON ANZAC DAY: THURSDAY 25 APRIL
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father was a civil servant. After studying at Eton, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for several years, and this inspired his first novel, Burmese Days. After two years in Paris, he returned to England to work as a teacher and then in a bookshop. In 1936 he travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he was badly wounded. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC. A prolific journalist and essayist, Orwell wrote some of the most influential books in English literature, including the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political allegory Animal Farm. He died from tuberculosis in 1950.
His [Orwell’s] real talent was for analysing and explaining a tumultuous period in human history. -- Dorian Lynsky * Guardian * In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate. -- George Packer * The Atlantic *
