George Orwell Audiobooks

Plain prose turned on poverty in the industrial north, in The Road to Wigan Pier

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Who is George Orwell?

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903 to 1950), the English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic whose short life produced some of the most consequential prose of the twentieth century. His writing is marked by famous lucidity, sharp social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism in every form – authoritarian communism and fascism alike – and a commitment to democratic socialism.

He is best remembered for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but his nonfiction stands just as tall: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his record of working-class life in industrial Northern England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), drawn from his time soldiering for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. His influence runs so deep that Orwellian is now part of the language, along with his coinages: Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink, the Thought Police. In 2008, The Times named him the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

George Orwell in audiobooks

Orwell’s famously lucid prose is a gift to the audiobook: sentences built to be understood first time are sentences built to be heard. The Road to Wigan Pier, the title in our catalogue, shows the writer as reporter, documenting working-class life in the industrial North of England at first hand and refusing to look away. Heard aloud, its mix of hard detail and moral argument feels startlingly immediate, and for British listeners the geography alone gives it extra charge.

It is also an ideal way into the wider Orwell: the social conscience and the distrust of comfortable answers that drive Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are already fully formed here, in nonfiction.