From 1984 to 2024: George Orwells Life and Legacy, with Gary Younge & Les Wilson

Chaired by Richard Blair

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of 1984, so we could not hold a book festival without a special event celebrating George Orwell’s work. Richard Blair, the great novelist’s son and Patron of the Orwell Society, will do us the honour of chairing this conversation featuring Les Wilson, author of Orwell’s Island: George, Jura and 1984, and Gary Younge, recipient of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. Les will explain about the circumstances in which the classic novel came to be written at Barnhill, an isolated farmhouse on the north end of Jura, while Gary will talk about what receiving the Orwell Prize has meant to him, and about the influence Orwell had on his own groundbreaking journalistic and academic work. Quentin Kopp, Chair of the Orwell Society and son of Georges Kopp – Orwell’s brigade commander in Spain – kindly helped us organise this event and will also be present.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine, the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media and winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism. He has written six books: Dispatches From the Diaspora, From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter; Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States; and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.

A former political journalist, Les Wilson is Creative Director of Caledonia TV, directing and executive producing documentaries on Scottish history, the British monarchy (Scotland’s War, The Enchanted Glass), and many programmes in the Scottish Gaelic language on literature and arts. He is co-author (with Seona Robertson) of Scotland’s War and has a novel and several history books to his name: Islay Voices, The Drowned and the Saved: How War Came to the Hebrides (winner of Scotland’s National Book Awards, history) and Putting the Tea in Britain: How Scots Invented our National Drink.