Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris and London', published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in 1934.
An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937). Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.
Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.
In 1945, Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and 'doublethink' - entering popular use. By now Orwell's health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.
Sir Stephen Harold Spender (1909–1995), English poet, translator, literary critic and editor, was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford, where he first became associated with such other outspoken British literary figures as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. His book The Thirties and After (1979) recalls these figures and others prominent in the arts and politics and his Journals 1939–1983, published in 1986 and edited by John Goldsmith, are a detailed account of his times and contemporaries.
His passionate and lyrical verse, filled with images of the modern industrial world yet intensely personal, is collected in such volumes as Twenty Poems (1930), The Still Centre (1939), Poems of Dedication (1946), Collected Poems, 1928–1985 (1986).
World Within World, Stephen Spender's autobiography, contains vivid portraits of Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and many other prominent literary figures. First published in 1951 and still in print, World Within World is recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to come out of the 1930s and 1940s. There can be few better portrayals of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.
The Destructive Element (1935), The Creative Element (1953), The Making of a Poem (1962) and Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (1974), about literary exchanges between Britain and the United States, contain literary and social criticism. Stephen Spender's other works include short stories, novels such as The Backward Son and the heavily autobiographical The Temple (set in Germany on the 1930s) and translations of the poetry of Lorca, Altolaguerra, Rilke, Hölderlin, Stefan George and Schiller. From 1939 to 1941 he co-edited Horizon magazine with Cyril Connolly and was editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1967.
Stephen Spender owed his own early recognition and publication as a poet to T. S. Eliot. In turn Spender was always a generous champion of young talent, from his raising a fund for the struggling 19-year-old Dylan Thomas, to a lifelong commitment to helping promote the publication of newcomers. In 1972, with his passionate concern for the rights of banned and silenced writers to free expression, he was the chief founder of Index on Censorship, in response to an appeal on behalf of victimised authors worldwide by the Russian dissident Litvinov.
John Sutherland, emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London, has written the authorised biography of Spender, published by Penguin in 2004.
Stephen Spender's New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, was published by Faber in 2004.
Edited by Lara Feigel and John Sutherland with Natasha Spender, the New Selected Journals, 1939–1995, were published by Faber and Faber in 2012.
Natasha Spender died on 21 October 2010. Stephen and Natasha Spender are survived by their son Matthew and daughter Lizzie. Matthew Spender's A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents, a memoir triggered by the death of his mother, was published in the UK by William Collins in August 2015 and in the UK by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October 2015.