Whether through the prestigious Orwell Prizes, awarded each year to the books and journalism which best meet Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’, the Orwell Youth Prize for young writers across the UK, or the growing number of Orwell-related activities which take place under its auspices – from events, lectures and dramatised live-reading to the Orwell Fellowship of writers and journalists – the Foundation aims to use Orwell’s work to celebrate honest writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives and confront uncomfortable truths – and, in doing so, to promote Orwell’s values of integrity, decency and fidelity to truth.
Through this work we hope to connect with the many different constituencies to whom Orwell and his writings are a source of inspiration, from policy-makers and politicians to students and schoolchildren, and to offer a platform for debate and discussion designed to appeal to the widest possible public audience. As the only website officially sanctioned by the Orwell Estate, we also publish work by George Orwell, articles about Orwell and maintain a regularly updated library of online resources.
Nearly seventy years after his death, Orwell has never been more relevant to the world we inhabit. In myriad ways, the terrain of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its bureaucratic obfuscations, its surveillance culture and its denial of objective truth, can seem uncomfortably close to our own. From the corruption of the media to pervasive new technologies, and from poverty and inequality to the rise of political extremism, his concerns are as germane to the twenty-first century as they were to the circumstances in which his great novels were conceived. We are hard at work to sustain this remarkable legacy.
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Our Opportunities
Volunteer with the Orwell Youth Prize! The Orwell Youth Prize is an annual writing Prize for young people in secondary school years 7-13, using the writing of George Orwell to encourage entrants to think and write about the world they live in.
