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Novelist and essayist, born in Motihari, Bengal, India. He studied at Eton, and served in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police (1922--7), but rejected the political injustice of imperial life (recounted in the novel Burmese Days, 1934) to live as a beggar in the East End of London, which became the subject for his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Similarly researched experiences led to the writing of A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938) and The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). During World War 2, he was war correspondent for the BBC and the Observer, and wrote for the Tribune. His intellectual honesty motivated his biting satire of Communist ideology in Animal Farm (1945) - a masterpiece which was overshadowed only by his novel 1984 (1949), a classic pessimistic satire about the threat of political tyranny.