Remembering Orwell

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

1984 is the year George Orwell made his own through his ominous bestselling novel of the future, written in 1948. It was, therefore, an appropriate project for this year to interview those people who knew and remember George Orwell. Here are conversations, interviews, and snippets culled from memoirs and letters, written by friends and the not-so-friendly. The result is a patchwork portrait of a man never as famous in his lifetime as he was to become in the decades following his death in 1950. Here are people who met and interacted with Orwell (Eric Blair in those days) in his unhappy school days, in Burma, in Spain; as a critic, a journalist, a hobo, a teacher, a shopkeeper, an invalid, and, most intimately of all, as an adoptive parent. Based on interviews recorded for the CBC radio program “George Orwell: A Radio Biography.”