Orwell and Empire: A Conversation with Douglas Kerr

Contemporary readers are most familiar with George Orwell’s later works of political satire, such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Less known is the fact that the writer, who is often considered the epitome of ‘Englishness’, was born in India and as a young man served for five years in the Imperial Police in Burma—an experience that reverberated throughout his oeuvre. In Orwell and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), Douglas Kerr offers the first comprehensive study of Orwell’s writing about the East and of the East in his writing.