Seven decades on from his death, George Orwell is alive and well in publishing. Last year alone saw a slew of new releases about the man and his fictive worlds. There was Orwell: The New Life, a second and now definitive biography by Orwell authority D.J. Taylor. Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia explored the reception of his work in the Soviet Union, while Oliver Lewis’s The Orwell Tour retraced the peripatetic author’s steps. In her novel Julia, Sandra Newman reimagined 1984 from the viewpoint of Winston Smith’s tragic lover, and in her genre-defying book Wifedom, Anna Funder brought back into sharp focus Orwell’s first spouse, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. 

And then, there are the books by Orwell himself. Many readers might have reached for examples of “plague literature” by Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, and Albert Camus for wisdom and sustenance during the pandemic, but fresh generations of them consistently turn to Orwell’s two great dystopian novels, Animal Farm and 1984, when their lives are affected by leaders who get too big for their boots and erode civil liberties and human rights. Sales of 1984 skyrocketed in Russia following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Journalists invoke Orwell’s touchstone texts in articles on propaganda, hyper-surveillance, curtailed freedom of speech, and cancel culture. The message is clear: Orwell is still in demand because Orwell is still relevant.