George Orwell Blogs Starting August 9th

Okay so not exactly

If you’ve read them you will know that they are as rich as any of his better-known political writing and novels. If you haven’t, it seems like the perfect way to discover them.

The diaries will be published in blog form on the George Orwell prize website each day 70 years after they were first written, opening up a wonderful opportunity to acquaint and reacquaint with Orwell in a very accessible way, offering eyewitness accounts from the 1930s on everything from unemployment, fascism and communism, but also his musings on the natural world.

The project kicks off on August 9th and covers an important part of his life as a writer, beginning just before the period he spent recovering from tuberculosis in Morocco in 1938 and immediately following his time in Spain during the Spanish civil war, which led to the writing of ‘Homage to Catalonia’, my favourite Orwell book, and when he was writing his 1939 novel ‘Coming up for Air’.

Having been wounded fighting in Spain, Orwell was much changed by his experiences during that key 1936-37 period and it marked a turning point in his writing and thinking. After this time, as he put it, he knew where he stood.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”


http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/home.aspx