George Orwell Trivia | 40 facts about the famous writer

George Orwell was an English writer, that amongst his two most popular books were the “1984” and “The animal farm”, which are considered classics.

Let’s find out more about this emblematic writer!

1. His full name was Eric Arthur Blair.
2. He was born on 25th June 1903.
3. He became popular by his pen name George Orwell.
4. He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.
5. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.
6. As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.
7. He is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm written in 1945.
8. Also, he is know for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four written in 1949.
9. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture.
10. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.
11. Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture.
12. There is a specific adjective originated from his syrname- “Orwellian”.
13. Orwellian describes totalitarian and authoritarian social practices and it is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms.
14. Some of his very popular neologisms are the following: “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “proles”, “unperson”, and “thoughtcrime”.
15. Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) spent five years at the St. Cyprian School for boys in Eastbourne, England.
16. His not-so-good experience there later inspired his melodramatic essay Such, Such Were the Joys.
17. In this account, he called the school’s proprietors “terrible, all-powerful monsters” and labeled the institution itself “an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive.”
18. While Blair’s misery is now considered to be somewhat exaggerated, the essay was deemed too libelous to print at the time, which resulted to be finally published in 1968 after his death.
19. He was expelled from his “crammer” school (an institution designed to help students “cram” for specific exams) for sending a birthday message attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor.
20. His first complete biography was written by Sir Bernard Crick’s and obtained the title George Orwell: A Life.
21. While studying at Eton College, Orwell made up a song about John Crace, his school’s housemaster, in which he made fun of Crace’s appearance and penchant for Italian art.
22. As many of the most successful writers, Orwell’s full time job was not writing.
23. Over the years, he worked as a police officer for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (present-day Myanmar), a high school teacher, a bookstore clerk, a propagandist for the BBC during World War II, a literary editor, and a war correspondent.
24. He also had stints as a dishwasher in Paris and as a hop-picker (for breweries) in Kent, England, but those jobs were for research purposes while “living as a tramp” and writing his first book about his experiences, Down and Out in Paris and London.
25. Actually, he chose to publish the book under a pseudonym, George Orwell, for the first time and -guess what- the name stuck.
26. In 1931, while investigating poverty for his aforementioned memoir, Orwell intentionally got himself arrested for being “drunk and incapable.” He wanted “to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled”.
27. At the time, he had been using the pseudonym Edward Burton and posing as a poor fish porter.
28. After drinking several pints and almost a whole bottle of whisky and ostensibly making a scene (it’s uncertain what exactly was said or done), Orwell was arrested. His crime didn’t warrant prison time like he had hoped, and he was released after spending 48 hours in custody.
29. He wrote about the experience in an unpublished essay titled Clink.
30. While working as a police officer in Burma, George Orwell got his knuckles tattooed.
31. Adrian Fierz, who knew Orwell, told one of his biographers, Gordon Bowker, that the tattoos were small blue spots, “the shape of small grapefruits,” and Orwell had one on each knuckle.
32. Orwell noted that some Burmese tribes believed tattoos would protect them from bullets and he may have gotten inked for similarly superstitious reasons, but according to his biographer it’s more likely that he wanted to set himself apart from the British establishment in Burma.
33. He knew 7 foreign languages.
34. In his youth, he learned French from Aldous Huxley, who briefly taught at Orwell’s boarding school and later went on to write Brave New World. Orwell ultimately became fluent in French, and at different points in his life he studied Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Burmese, to name a few.
35. At the age of 33, Orwell arrived in Spain, shortly after fighting had broken out in 1936, hoping to write some newspaper articles.
36. Instead, he ended up joining the Republican militia to “fight fascism” because “it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” So, he fought voluntarily, like Ernest Hemingway and other leftist writers.
37. The following year, he was shot in the neck by a sniper, but survived. He described the moment of being shot as “a tremendous shock—no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing.”
38. He wrote about his war experiences in the book Homage to Catalonia.
39. Although so many people people wrote biographies of George Orwell, in his will he requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow, Sonia Brownell, repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him. So, they were written later.
40. He died on 21st of 1950,