Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have together sold over 40 million copies. Even now, he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international power-politics.
D.J. Taylor’s new biography Orwell: The New Life, the first full-length study for 20 years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material – newly-discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues, the recollections of the dwindling band of people who remember him, new information about his life in the early 1930s – to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologizing man.
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D. J. Taylor's Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. He is also the author of a dozen novels, among them Trespass and Derby Day, both of which were longlisted for the Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918; Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951, and On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a trustee of both the Orwell Foundation and the Orwell Archive at University College, London.