George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) was a British writer and journalist. Born in India, then under British rule, he wrote works sharply criticizing totalitarianism, drawing on experiences such as volunteering in the Spanish Civil War.
After Animal Farm (1945), a fable in which an animals’ revolution turns into dictatorship, he published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, a landmark dystopian novel depicting a society in which the dictator “Big Brother” watches every citizen and controls even language and memory. Words such as “Big Brother” and “doublethink” are still used to describe surveillance societies.
