George Orwell’s most celebrated work, 1984, and the prescient vision it contains of a society governed by Big Brother, predates the constant monitoring of people and data we are familiar with today by over 70 years. But his life was every bit as fascinating and forward-looking as his books.


Orwell studied at Eton, joined the police in Burma, fought in the Spanish Civil War, fiercely opposed Stalinism, and lived in London’s slums while working as a journalist. With illustrations by a team of artists including Juanjo Guarnido, Enki Bilal, Manu Larcenet, Blutch and André Juillard, Pierre Christin and Sébastien Verdier’s Orwell offers readers an intimate yet definitive portrait of our greatest political writer.


“Christin, Verdier, et al. have pulled off a rare feat. They have taken one of the most straightforward writers in the English language and made his canon and life story more accessible.” – The Orwell Society