Whitbread award biography examples

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His biography, Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. His new biography, Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023. D.J. Taylor is a member of the Orwell Council.

The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity. If you value these resources, please consider becoming a Friend or Patron or making a donation to support our work. You can find more work about Orwell in our library.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the I

      14-7-2003

CLAIRE TOMALIN

(b. 1933)

My inspiration

Claire Tomalin

GUARDIAN

John Crace
Tuesday November 7, 2000

Claire Tomalin is one of our best known non-fiction writers. She won the Whitbread Prize for her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Several Strangers, a collection of her journalism, has just been published in paperback.

Within a year I moved back in with my mother and returned to Hitchin as a day girl. This was a wonderful time; due to the war, the school had kept on a couple of teachers, Miss Hughes and Miss Wells, well beyond their retirement age and between them they brought English and history to life for me and cemented the idea that the subjects were not divided.

'By 15, I had become a thoroughly rebellious adolesce

A monumental biography of Matisse which was started by Hilary Spurling 15 years ago was last night named the £30,000 Whitbread book of the year in arguably the closest vote in the prize's two-decade history.

Heated debate over nearly two hours saw the judges agonising between the Spurling tome, Kate Thompson's children's book, The New Policeman, and the fifth part of poetry veteran Christopher Logue's Iliad epic, also written over many years.

But after a complicated points system was allotted to each of the books for the prize - which pits poetry, a first novel, a novel, biography and children's fiction against each other - Matisse The Master proved the victor.

Announcing the winner at a ceremony in London, Michael Morpurgo, the former Children's Laureate who chaired the judges, said: "So many people felt it was a massive work, but yet it didn't read like it. It read like a story.

"We were reading about this man and his pictures and the life that he had, his family and his travels. Somehow she managed to paint a picture of a painter that was accessible to people not necessarily familiar with art. It was an extraordinary achievement to write a book that length and you get to the end and you're sorry it's finished."

But Mr Morpurgo admitted that the judges, who included the actress Joanna David and her daughter Emilia Fox, and the novelist and biographer Margaret Drabble, were forced to resort to a system of proportional representation to decide. "It was unbelievably close. I've never been in a judging panel which was as close. We had to go over and over it until we were absolutely sure," he said.

The runner-up was The New Policeman which was a "short, short head" ahead of Logue's slender volume, Cold Calls. Mr Morpurgo called The New Policeman an "extraordinary evocation" of the part of Ireland where Ms Thompson, the daughter of the writer and political thinker EP Thompson, now lives. He described C

English author (born 1949)

For the British academic, see Peter Ackroyd (biblical scholar). For the Canadian actor and comedian, see Peter Aykroyd.

Peter AckroydCBE, FRSL (born 5 October 1949) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.

Early life and education

Ackroyd was born in London and raised on a council estate in East Acton, in what he has described as a "strict" Roman Catholic household by his mother and grandmother, after his father disappeared from the family home. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon fellow at Yale University.

Work

The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and