Y A S M I N ALIBHAI-BROWNPAUL ANDERSONNEAL ASCHERSON

RICHARD BLAIRBRIAN CATHCARTROBERT COOPERDAVID HARE IAN HARGREAVESTOBY HARNDENANDREW GAMBLETIMOTHY GARTON-ASHAMELIA GENTLEMANPETER GODWINJONATHAN HEAWOODPETER HENNESSY

PETER HITCHENSIAN JACKPETER KELLNERDAVID LIPSEY

PENELOPE LIVELYSUE MACGREGORDEBORAH MABBETTMATTHEW PARRISRAJA SHEHADEHJEAN SEATONBRIAN SEWELLFRANCINE STOCKD.J. TAYLORBOYD TONKINNICHOLAS TIMMINSTONY WRIGHT

ENCOUNTERING ORWELL

ENCOUNTERING ORWELL

THE ORWELL PRIZEwww.theorwellprize.co.uk

Introduction

This collection of encounters with Orwell is riveting. We asked our winners and judges - writers, journalists, thinkers - to tell us about their own moment of engagement. Some are touching and curious, some scabrous and bold, some contrary. There is a quite powerful reek of adolescent hormones (but of a worthy kind - these earnest young folk are recalled with some affection by their more mature keepers). This is just the beginning - we think there are a host more encounters out there.

Above all, this collection shows that readers are changed by reading. This is why the Orwell Prize matters.

Professor Jean Seaton, Director of the Orwell Prize

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The Orwell Prize

Yasmin Alibhai-BrownWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2002

I was intense when young, feeling everything too much, romantic and idealistic, fiercely anti-colonialist, often feeling alone and an outsider. This was in Uganda, where I was born and raised. I remember going to the cinema to see a Chaplin film and being thrown out because I didn’t stand up and sing God Save the Queen. Parents, for a while, would not let their kids be seen with me. Asians back there kept their heads down, made money and avoided troublesome politics.

My family life was desperately unhappy and so books became my solace, my shelter from the daily storms. I recently found an old exercise book, part diary, part literary anthology. Between carefully copied extracts from great works are juvenile poems and ruminations. We had no democracy, no freedom when Britain ruled over us. Then fleetingly, we got the vote, and possibilities opened up, hopes soared. All too soon the elected President became a dictator.

This is an entry dated February 1968, by which time all democratic dreams had collapsed and state murders were rife:

The Hanging. George Orwell. This is our story. How does an Englishman know us? ?1? Can I write like him? No because his English is so great. Mr Johnson says I can try. How?!?

Well I tried and tried. And read and read Orwell. My folk still can’t see why I chose to write about troublesome politics. They have never read George Orwell.

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Encountering Orwell

Paul AndersonJudge, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2014

I took to Orwell as soon as I discovered Animal Farm at the age of 13 in 1973, on the recommendation of my grandfather, who had been a Tribune reader in the 1940s when Orwell was the paper’s literary editor (I’d read Down and Out in Paris and London just before, but it hadn’t really registered). I worked my way through Nineteen Eighty-Four, the 1930s novels, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, most of them bought from the Orwell Bookshop in Ipswich, which was run by a grumpy Irish republican.

I stopped exploring Orwell when I went to university – Orwell was absent from the Oxford PPE reading list – but I discovered his essays and journalism in my final year as an undergraduate and have been a devotee ever since.

The four-volume Penguin Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters became the nearest things I had to sacred texts as I trained to be a journalist … and in 1986 I got Orwell’s old job as reviews editor of Tribune. My office there housed the paper’s bound-volume archive, and I spent hours engrossed in Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ columns when I should have been doing other things.

‘As I Please’ remains to me the model of how to do a weekly opinion piece. And I don’t think I am alone.

Orwell in Tribune: ‘As I Please’ and Other Writings, 1943-4, compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, was published by Politico’s/Methuen in 2006. A new edition is imminent from Aaaargh! Press.

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The Orwell Prize

Dammit, I have little memory of when I first read George Orwell. All I can reconstruct is that it must have been at Cambridge, that Nineteen Eighty-Four was the first Orwell I encountered, and that - in 1953 or so - I took it to be another grim fantasy about a British dictatorship (there were several around just after the war).

I simply didn’t see it at all as a parable about Stalinist Europe at all. It was not until more than ten years later when I was a reporter in Poland that I met people risking their freedom by reading smuggled copies of the book and saying: ‘How did he know? How did he know?’

Neal AschersonWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 1994

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Encountering Orwell

The first time I read the works of George Orwell, my father, was when I was given a special copy of Animal Farm in 1956. It was one of only two copies printed I believe. I remember covering it in brown paper to preserve the leather tooling and taking it to school at the age of 12. I was delighted not only by how much I enjoyed reading it, but also that I think I understood the message.

This spurred me on to read more. However it was suggested that I should wait a little longer before going on to Nineteen Eight-Four as it was deemed to be a little too adult for me. I only waited 2 years.

From there I began to explore more of his work. I still go back from time to time to enjoy the wonderful observations and the diverse range of his subjects in his essays and journalism.

Richard BlairGeorge Orwell’s son; The Orwell Prize Council

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The Orwell Prize

I don’t remember exactly when I first read Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language but I do remember the shiver it sent through me. I had been writing for a living for years by then but suddenly I saw my work in a new and alarming light. It was as if I had stepped in front of a magnifying mirror and beheld a rash of blemishes on my face that I had never known were there.

Modern prose, Orwell laments, ‘consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse’. And one by one, choosing his words for their meaning and his similes (like that one about the henhouse) for their vividness, he identifies and holds up to ridicule the commonest sins not only in political writing but in all writing.

His standards are very high. I doubt, for example, if there is a single writer in the English language who is not occasionally guilty of using what Orwell calls a dying metaphor. But the essay seems to me to be an exquisite demonstration of the possibility of what it describes. Because every word and every image is just right, he is able to do what every writer aspires to do, and what most of us only achieve in rare flashes: he says what he means.

Brian CathcartWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 2000, Judge 2012

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Encountering Orwell

Here is a confession. Until the Orwell prize invited me to write this, with a couple of exceptions, I not read anything by George Orwell for several years. One of the exceptions was a few weeks back when, at a friend’s house, I found Animal Farm on the bedside table, and read a bit of it before going to sleep. It was more subtle than I remembered from my O-level, but I didn’t sit up all night to finish it.

To write this, I took a quick look at Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I think was the first thing I read: the passage towards the end with O’Brien, the only part I remember. Not compelling. Then I glanced at Down and Out in Paris and London which made an impact when I read it in my twenties. It still does. Open it at any page and it’s hard to put down. I next looked at the miscellaneous journalism: his articles, polemics, reviews. These grip you the moment you pick them up, he awakes the memory and the imagination.

Why? He is honest. (I saw Question Time the other night: every word of it dishonest!) With the outrages and lies coming from Moscow these things matter again. Much of what we get in politics is lies and apologies for lies. Re-reading Orwell is a remedy.

And the other exception? A few years back I read Homage to Catalonia - the last paragraph is so beautiful and strong that I learned it by heart.

Robert CooperWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 2004

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The Orwell Prize

George Orwell is a very unusual writer because the principles underlying his work are as important as the work. I no longer read him, because years ago, when I was obsessed with him, I felt I had sucked all the goodness from his essays. I don’t need to go back, because I’ve never forgotten them.

He should be part of every young person’s education, because he acts as a sort of palate-cleanser for all the familiar pretensions and small-mindedness of intellectual life. His biases – for freedom and for democracy, against dictatorship – appear simple, but aren’t. Temperamentally, I like the question he prefers to ask of all works of art – what is it saying?

The Orwell Prize is the only literary prize worth winning, because it alone assumes that writing’s effect on the world is as important as writing itself.

David HareJudge, the Orwell Prize 2003

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Encountering Orwell

With a generation of teenagers in the 1960s, I found myself in Manor Farm, where the words of the prophet were written on the farmhouse wall.

Orwell’s satire pointed us towards critical scepticism not about any particular regime or contemporary intellectual tendency but towards the ‘prevailing orthodoxy’, whatever it may be. In all prevailing orthodoxies, some animals are judged more equal than others.

Armed with this insight, we blinked out of adolescence: weak on political loyalism and the culture of the tribe, but credible as journalists.

Ian HargreavesJudge, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2012

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The Orwell Prize

My first encounters with George Orwell were studying Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as school texts. But it was not until I stumbled across a copy of Decline of the English Murder and other essays that he gripped me. I was 17.

I still have the book: a slim, battered Penguin bought in a second-hand shop on Manchester’s Oxford Road. Before I’d parted with the 50p it cost me, I’d read much of it.

It was Orwell’s essay A Hanging that most affected me, the stray dog, the condemned man stepping around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet. I was struck by the spare simplicity of his language and his powers of descriptive observation in the eyewitness account of the Burmese execution.

At the end of the volume, he explained Why I Write. I was desperate to escape northern England (a year later I did, and I have seldom returned) and avoid what Orwell described as a life ‘simply smothered by drudgery’. I was determined to travel and was soon to become fascinated by Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War. I was intrigued by the notion of all writers as ‘vain, selfish, and lazy’ and the mystery that lay at ‘the very bottom of their motives’.

Looking back, I think it was the sense Orwell communicated of writing as a noble, yet egotistical, act that could both endure and change things in the here and now that would help lead me to seek a living from the printed word.

Toby HarndenWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 2012

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Encountering Orwell

Andrew GambleEditorial Board, Political Quarterly

My first memory of George Orwell was being given Animal Farm to read when I was still at school. I knew nothing about communism or the Bolshevik Revolution, but that did not matter. I was immediately captured by the simple power of the story, the betrayal of political hopes and ideals, the corruption of power. Compared to Nineteen Eighty-Four which I read later, Animal Farm is much more radical, and much more inspiring about the possibilities of politics. The ending of the book when the pigs become indistinguishable from the farmers to the watching animals makes Orwell’s own political standpoint very clear, and so different from the way the book was pressed into service in the cold war. It was a satire on both sides.

Animal Farm led me to Orwell’s other books. I remember particularly enjoying Down and Out in Paris and London, and the famous advice from the restaurateur:

Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you come back by another door— with the same chicken. That is restaurant work.

Orwell’s eye for the realities and absurdities of a class society was unrivalled. That scene still makes me laugh.

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The Orwell Prize

For a passionate Orwellian, it is shaming – but also a requirement of Orwellian honesty – to admit that I simply don’t remember when I first encountered his work. Probably at school, reading an obligatory Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm.

What I do remember, most vividly, is reading everything I could find in print by Orwell in 1977, just after I’d finished my final exams at Oxford, and before I set off to travel behind the iron curtain with the intention of becoming a political writer. I read him very deliberately, to learn how the master craftsman did it.

Animal Farm is his masterpiece, a perfect match of literary form and political content; but for me, the model for anyone going to write about complicated events abroad, cutting through the fog of war and lies, is Homage to Catalonia. And, like many of my generation, I still treasure my dog-eared Penguin four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. It is a political as well as a personal madeleine.

Timothy Garton-AshWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2006

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Encountering Orwell

Now, of course, I know that Animal Farm is an allegorical and dystopian novel reflecting events leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution, and that Orwell was trying to ‘fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole’. But when I read it first, aged 10, it was just a tragic fairy story. I was miserable about poor Boxer. I remember feeling bemused when I was probed by adults about what I’d made of it. ‘But what do you think it’s really about?’ they wanted to know. Bad pigs didn’t seem to be the right answer.

Later when I was working during a university holiday in a London restaurant (as a waitress not a plongeur) I enjoyed reading about Hotel X, and the absurd incompetence of the waiters Orwell worked with. ‘Once the waiter on the third floor dropped a roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fell into a litter of broken bread, torn paper, and so forth at the bottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and sent it up again.’ I liked the description of the waiter’s sweat dripping onto the toast he is preparing. ‘Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off’. There are pages and pages of detail on dirt and squalor - themes that return grimly elsewhere. But here it’s bleakly funny, and I loved it.

Amelia GentlemanWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2012

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The Orwell Prize

I have felt an affinity for George Orwell ever since I read Shooting an Elephant. A lean 3,000 words or so, the story draws on his time as a teenage officer in the Indian Imperial Police stationed in rural Burma. I read it by the light of a hissing Tilley lamp in a remote bush outpost when I was a conscripted 18-year-old patrol officer in the British South Police (as Rhodesia’s senior service was called). My BSAP uniform - khaki tunic, stable belt, lanyard - was the direct sartorial descendant of his. I too had an experimental moustache, trying to make myself look older - though I didn’t have the knuckle tattoos Orwell acquired in Burma.

From the first line I was disquieted: ‘In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.’ The story is a compressed portrait of the way the British ruled abroad and of the sullenness of a subject people.

But what struck me most across the fifty-year valley of time was its voice, the voice of one teenager speaking to another in a similar predicament, describing the awful burden of premature authority and the querulous insecurity that accompanies it. I read it with a rush of recognition.

What also occurred to me, really for the first time, was that you could write about this stuff. And although it took another twenty years’ marinating, that’s what I did. So, in a sense, I have Orwell to thank for making me a writer.

Peter GodwinWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 1997

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Encountering Orwell

Jonathan HeawoodJudge, the Orwell Prize for Books 2010

As a young teenager, I was hungry for intellectual stimulation but struggling to understand most of the books on my parents’ shelves. I seized on Animal Farm with relief. This world had echoes of CS Lewis and AA Milne. The farmyard setting was intriguing but inherently safe. However many obstacles might be cast in their way, nothing really bad can happen to talking animals.

Boxer’s disappearance sent a shiver down my spine but my confidence remained strong. Justice would prevail. Justice would prevail. I kept turning the pages, looking for the happy ending. It didn’t come. Instead, the injustices mounted up. These talking animals did not behave like the noble beasts of Narnia or the cuddly creatures of the Hundred Acre Wood. Their cruelty was all too human. And the author did not step in to save them. There was no redemption and no catharsis. I felt utterly betrayed.

I thought I was hardened by the time I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few years later. But once again, Orwell found my blind spot. Winston and Julia would not denounce each other, would they? Love can conquer all. No it can’t.

The stories were brutal when I first read them and they’re brutal now. Orwell described Animal Farm as a fairy story, but he stopped me believing in fairies, and he stopped me trusting the easy consolations of other authors. He showed how fairy tales – whether we find them in novels or political narratives (‘the great leap forwards’; ‘the trickle-down effect’; ‘the third way’) – always hide more than they reveal.

By tearing repeatedly through our expectations of justice, Orwell forced us to acknowledge the injustices that can’t be put right by stories. He left us with a very hard choice: to hunt, with increasing desperation, for new and more convincing fairy tales, or to confront reality. To read him now is to be made to grow up, again and again. However much we like to think we’re ready for reality, he reminds us how susceptible we still are to fairy tales. That’s his genius, and his challenge.

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The Orwell Prize

Peter HennessyWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 2007

I first encountered Orwell in the summer of 1966 between school and university. I bought The Road to Wigan Pier in Preston where I was spending (what in those days we didn’t call) a gap year. I had a part-time job with the Council and became very familiar with a big northern town in the midst of substantial slum clearance and rebuilding.

Though there was still a long way to go, it was fascinating to compare the difference the welfare state and better living standards had made since the Lancashire of the 1930s.

I never forgot the impact of reading Orwell’s denunciation of the precious, intellectual progressive wing of the Labour movement – it probably meant that I had it in for them before I’d met a single one!

I hadn’t encountered before the power of sparse but evocative language or anyone with a gift for such telling detail.

How I wish I’d read Politics and the English Language that summer before going to Cambridge and acquiring a taste for the prolix and the florid!

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Encountering Orwell

I’m surprised to find, that, when challenged, I can’t remember when I first read anything by George Orwell. I think I must have been 13 or 14, when I was racing too fast through every modern classic I could find. But I know I was 15 when George Orwell changed my life. It was a sparse collection of essays called ‘Inside the Whale’, a set-text, that did it. It fell to pieces years ago, and was in any case much disfigured by over-enthusiastic underlinings and marginal notes, in the red felt-tip that I affected at the time. But it led me to the (then newly-published) Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism which were, for many years afterwards, my most influential teacher. In judging any piece of writing, my test was ‘What would he have thought?’

The best books tell you what you know already, but have never seen so well-expressed. Here was my own disillusion, my own hopeless mixture of patriotism and stroppy radicalism, Cromwellian and Cavalier, magnified, refined and extended into a work of art.

Other influences have followed later. Nearly four decades of Fleet Street have left various sorts of marks, good and bad. Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer is nowadays never very far away from my mind. But always there is that imagined voice, tired, reedy, impatient and often on the verge of scorn, which I heard in my head for the first time nearly 50 years ago.

Peter HitchensWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2010

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The Orwell Prize

I knew a scene from Orwell’s books long before I read him. It was sometime in the early 1950s and I was out walking with my father and my eleven-years-older brother on the quiet Sunday roads of Fife. They were laughing about something they’d just read in a book. A thumbprint on a loaf of bread, the thumb inside a chamber-pot, the full chamber-pot under the kitchen table: later in life I recognized these as the memorable features of the Brookers’ lodging house in The Road to Wigan Pier.

Six years before Orwell got to Wigan, our father had lodged in another Lancashire coal-and-cotton town, and I think what I overheard on our walk that day was his praise of Orwell’s realism. Dad had stayed nowhere as bad – his lodgings also took in chorus girls – but the Brookers’ place wasn’t beyond his imagining. ‘On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave’ is still among my favourite literary sentences, both funny and disgusting.

Ian JackJudge, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2009

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Encountering Orwell

My school both introduced me to Orwell and came close to putting me off him. I resented having to read books to order, and Animal Farm was no exception. My resentment only increased when we were given our essay to write. What, we were asked, did Orwell mean by ‘some animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’? This seemed to me absurd. ‘More equal’ made as much sense as ‘almost unique’. Orwell was plainly guilty of lazy thinking and slovenly writing.

A few years later I reread Animal Farm out of choice. This time I could appreciate the irony and understand the hypocrisy that Orwell exposed - and also the precision of his prose. He armed me with the weapons I needed to defend myself against the seductive power of empty speeches, sloppy journalism and all forms of high-flown but low-grade political rhetoric.

Have I always kept them at bay, and have I always followed Orwell’s example in my own writing? No and no: of course not. But I have tried. His is the star that has always guided me. When young aspiring journalists seek my advice, it is always the same: read Orwell’s wonderful essay, Politics and the English Language – and digest its central message, that clear writing is a) vital for a healthy, open society and b) possible only when it reflects clear thinking.

Peter KellnerJudge, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2010

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The Orwell Prize

George Orwell was a great journalist, but not all journalists are like George Orwell. Most are just bad, but leave them to one side. Some, unlike Orwell, are straight reporters, conveyors of facts but careful not to mix them with opinions. Others, unlike Orwell, concern themselves with facts very little: any little story from the day’s news sets them off into purple prose designed at giving someone in power (who may or may not deserve it) a really horrid day.

What was unique about Orwell was his combination of scrupulous reporting with argued conclusions from that reporting, conclusions that did not owe their power to the multiplicity of virulent adjectives so much as to the humanity which motivated his writing.

That also characterises the best of the winners of the Orwell Prize – an honour which sadly escaped me though I was runner up three times! – and makes it the award all journalists, particularly journalists of the left, would love to get.

David LipseySpecial Award, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 1997

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Encountering Orwell

My Orwells are battered old Penguins. Oldest, by the look of it, is Keep the Aspidistra Flying, price 3/6, first published in 1962. I have a memory of reading it rather dutifully, because here was a writer one should be reading. And yes, I have a feeling that it was with that that I first put a toe in Orwell waters, rather than the more obvious Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is a faintly punctilious memory around reading that, also - with respect and awe rather than great pleasure.

But the interesting thing about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is the violent disjuncture between what memory I have of that first reading, and what hits me when I try the first few pages now. The memory is of reading in a flat, accepting kind of way - taking in a time, a place, a rather grey protagonist, and a narrative... and that was about it. Opening this grubby orange Penguin fifty odd years later, language leaps out at me: ‘Gordon Comstock... aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already’; ‘elvish children tripping Wendily through a bluebell glade’ - this in the satirical survey of literature enabled by the contents of the bookshop, where there is a ‘savage Darwinian struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye level and the works of dead men go up or down...’

I must read it again at once and ditch that (moth-eaten) memory.

Penelope LivelyGeorge Orwell Lecturer, 1991

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The Orwell Prize

In the basement room which acts for me as a sort of office-cum- library, there’s a whole wall of special books - mostly paperbacks, and several hundred of them; books I devoured over the years when I chaired A Good Read on Radio 4.

In many ways they represent my University; certainly they constitute my University of the Third Age, for many are books I should have read years before. There are three by George Orwell - two of them (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm) I actually had read and enjoyed decades before, but the third was my re-discovery of Orwell: his brilliant account of his experiences in Spain during the Civil War.

In Homage to Catalonia, the character of Orwell shines through: the New York Times in its obituary in the 1950s called him ‘honest, courageous and hopeful’. This equally describes the book, which is an important document of the Spanish Civil War.

It was published in 1938, soon after the events it described had ended. Despite his belief in the Republican cause, Orwell calls the war a ‘bloody pantomime’ - a chaotic succession of futile manoeuvres and pointless battles which apparently got nobody anywhere - except that the wrong side won. His portrayal of the poverty of the peasants, the antiquity of the weapons at their disposal, and the senselessness of the street fighting in Barcelona is unforgettable.

Homage to Catalonia is a sharp reminder of what a remarkable journalist Orwell was. Seventy-five years on it’s well worth picking up again and pondering.

Sue MacGregorJudge, the Orwell Prize for Books 2014

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Encountering Orwell

There are many good passages in The Road to Wigan Pier, but one of the most memorable is the account of coal mining, also published as an essay: ‘Down the Mine’. It was probably my first encounter with the notion that some jobs are seriously unpleasant. Orwell treads a fine line between dignifying the miner’s blackened and sweaty physique and conveying the dust, noise, and claustrophobia of the coal face.

Re-reading the essay, I was struck less by the use of the first person, although the verisimilitude of detail is there, than by the invocation of the second person: ‘you’, to convey that the reader is implicated, and at least has a duty to keep reading.

Orwell frames his account with reflections on how essential coal was to the British economy, and it is hard not to re-read his essay without thinking of the arbitrariness of economic rewards: of bankers on their bonuses and cleaners on the minimum wage. With his insistent ‘you’, Orwell tries to get his middle class readership to recognise the biased reference points in their thinking about how people live and what they earn.

My peers, like many comfortably-off Londoners, are astounded to learn how little most people live on, and we also lack a sense of how hard and dispiriting some jobs can be. Fortunately there are still writers who take on the task of telling us: Sarah O’Connor’s report for the Financial Times on working conditions at Amazon’s warehouse in Rugeley springs to mind.

Deborah MabbettEditor, Political Quarterly

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The Orwell Prize

Like many pre-pubescent boys I was going through a stage of reading everything I could get my hands on. I was nine or ten and at a boarding school high in the mists of the Vumba Mountains in the eastern highlands of what was then Southern Rhodesia. The place was damp and cold and there was no library: just one glass-fronted bookshelf in a corridor, stacked with mildewing books: a distinctly random selection, from pap to the classics. I devoured Little Men and then (somewhat sheepishly) Little Women, which was actually better. Then I saw a musty book called Animal Farm.

I loved animals, and grabbed it. The style was easy, clear and direct, and I read it the whole thing in two days, delighting in every page. I had no idea it was about communism. The allegory went right over my head. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm simply as a children’s fantasy about the animals taking over the farm. As an instinctive little Conservative, I was not at all surprised that attempts at equality failed, and I felt from the start some sympathy for the dispossessed farmer; and scepticism about the mutinous animals’ experiment. The book reinforced my prejudices.

I have since learned what Animal Farm was supposed to be about, but (though I can now appreciate the cleverness) I’ve gained little extra insight from this. The lesson about human (and animal) nature and the problem with idealistic social systems was perfectly clear to a little boy who thought this was just a story about some pigs, horses and chickens.

Thank you, Orwell, for confirming my early Conservatism. I followed where your thinking pointed, and was regrettably obliged to leave you behind.

Matthew ParrisWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005

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Encountering Orwell

The first essay of George Orwell which I read and to which I keep going back is his Politics and the English Language. The language currently used by politicians involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, which has occupied me for most of my adult life, offers many new examples of how the decline of the language has political causes and consequences.

The book I am now working on, based on the Edward Said Memorial Lecture I gave last February in London, revolves around a critical reading of words like security, separation fence, absentees and the like.

Using Orwell’s reflections on the decline of the language I’m attempting a critical reading whereby ‘negotiations for peace’ between Israel and Palestine are replaced by an interminable ‘peace process’, and an eight meter wall is referred to as a fence.

Orwell’s critique remains as relevant and significant in today’s world as it was when he first published his essay in 1946.

Raja ShehadehWinner, the Orwell Prize for Books 2008

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The Orwell Prize

In the late seventies I sallied out, wearing a new Ossie Clarke dress, to what counted as an uber-glamorous party, well at least for me. In a white-walled, early Habitat-ed, ethnic-art packed flat, the luminaries of the New Left laid down the line and developed ‘positions’. I tentatively suggested (in a discussion condemning the provincial backwardness of British culture in comparison to the superior French, Russian, American, Italian – basically any foreign variety) that you could identify Orwell’s voice in any single sentence. My Country Right or Left felt relevant, and I added that Nineteen Eighty-Four was formally innovative (this bit of the left were very keen on ‘formal’ novelty).

Gosh: did that get me put in my place.

The great theorist ticked me off - Orwell ‘reified’ common sense, which was a disguise for right wing views. The radical film critic instructed me that Orwell was a ‘social democrat’ and (hiss) an empiricist. The dear roly-poly Althusserian scolded me: Orwell merely covered up the hard work of saying complicated things (it was a point of honour that hard things were impossible to say). Being a chap with an eye for satire he riffed on Animal Farm - he did a good pig.

But, possibly I could be as serious as this coterie of oh-so-sure chaps? Us post-war children were tormented by how we might have reacted to facism. It was not a test us precious baby-boomers had taken. But Orwell set a model of integrity. Orwell’s disorientating willingness to identify disturbing things was so refreshing. Shooting an Elephant toppled expectations: reading it was like being on a roller-coaster. There was a British sensibility that Orwell was critical of yet pinned down. Of course, one would want Britain to be better – fairer, cleverer, righter. Orwell offered a way to be a critical patriot.

So that night, in my head, I upped sticks and trudged off.

Jean SeatonDirector, the Orwell Prize

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Encountering Orwell

I was two when Down and Out in Paris and London was published, and sixteen and enjoying the new freedoms of the Lower 6th when I first read it.

The year was 1947. As London was then still a blitzed city of bombed sites and propped buildings, food rationing harsh enough for bread, if too stale to eat without butter, always to be reduced to crumbs and bread sauce, and I had patched patches on the knees of my trousers because clothing too was rationed, Down and Out was in some small sense familiar.

I learned from it that raw truth is as telling as fiction, that an observant writer skilled with words need never embellish what he sees, and that the polished gloss of black dust on a delivery coalman’s shoulders is of far greater interest than the immaculate uniform of a King-Admiral.

Given to purple passages as a budding essayist – as I occasionally was, and perhaps still am – Orwell demonstrated that language should be clipped and pared if it is to be stiletto deadly, that prolixity may have a place in oratory, but not in print.

Brian SewellWinner, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2003

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The Orwell Prize

My first true encounter with Orwell wasn’t the first time I read his work. At fourteen I had consumed Animal Farm. Others had told me, repeatedly, that it was an impressive ideological puzzle and satire. I couldn’t entirely decipher it, of course, but appreciated its importance. Yet it didn’t engage me as Down and Out in Paris and London would within a couple of years.

I was initially wary: was this believable documentary or over-heated fiction? Did Orwell actually do this stuff? Did he dream these people up from observations in the street or by living close enough to inhale the ‘sour reek of refuse carts’ or worse? Early in the narrative a wealthy French youth, Charlie, gives an account of visiting a young prostitute that is repellently ‘picturesque’ in its detail. Come on, I thought, this is overdoing it.

But then comes the detailed descent into poverty and the prose is simple and sure. The dilemmas of matching limited energies to resources, the inventive accounting for a few sous, the jobs just missed, the long toil in infernal steam of the plongeur, the slave’s slave, at the Hotel X, the consolations and aggravations of companions including the philosopher-with-a-bad-leg Boris - all these were rendered vividly, with Orwell’s sharp eye, compassion and anger.

One sentence stuck immediately: economical and ironic in tone, it’s a desperately learnt piece of advice, as true now as then. ‘It is fatal to look hungry, it makes people want to kick you.’

Francine StockJudge, the Orwell Prize for Books 2010

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Encountering Orwell

My parents were not remotely ‘bookish’ people. My mother’s idea of a ‘good book’, repeatedly pressed on me as a child, was Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands, a travelogue from 1925, which in consequence of this enthusiasm I never read. But she did possess a small shelf of paperbacks, bought in the early 1960s, and one of them, by the grace of God, was the first Penguin paperback of A Clergyman’s Daughter. A mature critical judgement would probably maintain that this is not the greatest novel Orwell ever wrote, but at the age of 12 I was transfixed by Dorothy’s adventures among the hop-pickers and the extraordinary Trafalgar Square scene, done with dialogue and stage directions as in a play, which I hadn’t yet the nous to comprehend had been robbed from Joyce, not to mention my first exposure to one of Orwell’s great fictional themes – the rebellion that doesn’t work.

And so English Literature, in some odd way, started here for me – down among the chalk-dust of the dreadful private school in which Dorothy teaches and the Suffolk rectory in which she labours as her father’s uncomplaining drudge: those grim Thirties interiors, as precious to me as the autumnal leaves which strow the brooks in Vallombrosa.

D.J. TaylorThe Orwell Prize Council

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The Orwell Prize

Who now remembers Germano Facetti? Not many, I imagine, beyond ageing publishers and historians of graphic design. A teenage anti-Fascist in Italy, he was arrested in 1943 and sent as a slave labourer to the Mauthausen camp. Later, as a book designer in London and head of design for Penguin, his superbly selected interpretative covers opened the gateway into modern literature for me.

For Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he had in 1962 himself designed a cover with an all-seeing solitary eye. But it was the late-Sixties Penguin Nineteen Eighty-Four that emerged from his studio to reel me in, forever, into Orwell’s world. It features a 1941 painting, The Control Room, Civil Defence Headquarters, by William Roberts, Vorticist turned war artist. Plump but anxious and frenetic, Roberts’s map-scanning, phone-wielding bureaucrats undertake tasks whose urgency carries an undertone of both pointlessness and malice. So Roberts (with, behind him, Facetti’s brilliant Penguin design team) introduced Nineteen Eighty-Four to me as a nightmare of hectic but futile drudgery.

With uncanny critical acumen, the cover image nudged me to expect not only a solemn dystopia prompted by the murderous dictatorships of mid-century Europe but an airless plunge into the sort of deadening, oppressive office job I both feared for myself - and suspected that my parents’ generation had fallen into for the sake of security. First of all, it wasn’t about ideology, resistance or overt tyranny, but the hell of bad work.

Boyd TonkinThe Orwell Prize Council

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Encountering Orwell

Memory fades, but I am pretty sure my first encounters with Orwell were the traditional ones. Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and then on to The Road to Wigan Pier - always loving the account, when it emerged, of T.S. Eliot turning Animal Farm down.

But my fondest meeting was when one of my sons, having resisted advice to read Orwell as a teenager, discovered the great man for himself in his twenties – partly through that neat little essay Books and Cigarettes which has been dear to me ever since my daughter told me that “you have a wonderful warm smell. You smell of old books and cigarettes.”

Nicholas TimminsJudge, the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2013

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The Orwell Prize

Every time I pick up one of the volumes of the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, as I frequently do, I am reminded from the plates inside the cover that I acquired these as part of a student prize at the LSE nearly half a century ago. They were to sit at my bedside for many years afterwards, a source of constant nourishment and delight.

I had already read the novels, but it was not until I started reading the essays that my intoxication with Orwell began. Here was a voice, combining directness and decency, of a kind that I had not encountered before. It did not matter what he was writing about - whether the nature of Englishness or how to make a cup of tea - because the writing was so striking. I would start copying out the sentences I particularly liked - about England being a family with the wrong members in control, about why the proletariat of Hammersmith would not slaughter the bourgeoisie of Kensington - until I realised I was copying nearly everything out.

The essay I loved most was Politics and the English Language, and remains so. Nobody should be allowed to write about politics, or practice it, unless they have read this essay first.

Tony WrightEditor, Political Quarterly

Director of the Orwell Prize:Professor Jean Seaton

j.seaton@westminster.ac.uk

Prize Administrator:Edward Crane

edward.crane@mediastandardstrust.org0207 848 7930

Mailing Address:The Orwell Prize

King’s College LondonStrand Bridge House138-142 The StrandLondon WC2R 1HH

www.theorwellprize.co.uk

THE ORWELL PRIZE

To celebrate 21 years of the Orwell Prize, we have asked winners, judges, and governing board members to share their experiences of reading George Orwell’s writing.

The Orwell Prize is Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. Every year, prizes are awarded to the book and journalism entry which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. The Prize was founded by the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick in its present form in 1993, awarding its first prizes in 1994.

It is run in partnership with the Media Standards Trust on behalf of the Council of the Orwell Prize. The Prize is supported by Political Quarterly, Media Standards Trust, Richard Blair (Orwell’s son) and A. M. Heath.

Sponsored and supported by:

‘What I have most wanted to do...

is to make political writing into an art’

www.theorwellprize.co.uk @theorwellprize