Orwell, George

Pseudonym for Eric Blair, English author, critic and journalist, born in Motihari, in British India, where his British father had lived for almost thirty years and was a colonial civil servant working in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. In 1904, Orwell travelled with his mother (the daughter of a tea merchant with business in Burma) and his sister to England. From 1911, he was a pupil in a boarding school, the first years at St Cyprians and later, between 1917 and 1921, at the country’s poshest school Eton College, where he had a scholarship. Here he published his first works in various school magazines. This was also where he started to develop his antipathy to the English class society. He later failed to gain a scholarship for university studies. Disappointed by this, he applied to the British Imperial Police in Burma and he worked there from 1922 to 1927.