George Orwell

Eric Blair was born in India and sent to boarding school in England, where he won a scholarship to Eton and learned to loathe the class system. Instead of university he joined the Imperial Police in Burma. Five years there left him with a lasting hatred of empire and a determination to find out how the poor lived.

So he went and lived as they did: washing dishes in Paris hotel kitchens, tramping between workhouses in Kent and London, sleeping in doss-houses, picking hops. Down and Out in Paris and London appeared in 1933 under a new name, George Orwell. It was followed by a bleak book on the industrial north and a series of novels that sold modestly.

In 1936 he went to Spain to fight fascism and was shot through the throat by a sniper. He escaped the country with his wife just ahead of the Communist purges, and the experience made him an enemy of totalitarianism in every form. Animal Farm, his fable about the Russian revolution, was turned down by four publishers, including T. S. Eliot at Faber, before it appeared in 1945. His wife Eileen died on the operating table that same spring.

Ill with tuberculosis and raising an adopted son alone, he retreated to a farmhouse on the island of Jura and wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, typing the final draft himself in bed because no typist would come. It was published in June 1949. He died in a London hospital seven months later, aged 46.