George Orwell: 'In the air'. Photograph:
BBC
A major celebration of George Orwell kicks off
today with the inaugural "Orwell Day", to be followed by a month-long Orwell
season on Radio 4 and a mass giveaway of
one of his most famous essays, Politics and the
English Language.
The author of Nineteen
Eighty-Four and Animal
Farm died on 21 January 1950, and 2013 also marks the 110th anniversary of
his birth on 25 June 1903. The Orwell Estate, The Orwell Prize and the author's
publisher Penguin has decided to launch an annual event, "Orwell Day", on 21
January in "recognition of one of Britain's greatest and most influential
writers of the 20th century", and to "celebrate his writing in all its forms and
explore the profound influence he has had on the media and discourse of the
modern world", it said.
Orwell's 1946 essay
Politics and the English Language is being given away for free from
the Orwell prize's website, as well as published in a 99p edition by
Penguin. "We're aiming to get everyone reading it – in schools, everywhere. It's
just one essay, and it's such a radical essay, with the message that language is
corrupt, but you can do something about it," said Jean Seaton, chair of the Orwell prize judges,
professor of media history at the University of Westminster and the official
historian of the BBC.
Today also marks the
launch of new-look editions of four Orwell books, Animal Farm, Down
and Out in Paris and London, Homage
to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Penguin Classics, with the
latter sporting a new
jacket with the book's title almost entirely blacked out, in recognition of
the novel's topic of censorship.
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