Your guide to George Orwell and his visions of dystopia

• Read more | Rewriting the past: the history that inspired Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Instead of university, Blair bucked the trend for graduating Etonians and headed, in 1922, to the colony of Burma (now Myanmar) to join the Indian Imperial Police. While he liked the place and people, he grew ashamed of colonial oppression there. The inequality meted out by the British fuelled the flames of his socialist politics and by 1927, had driven him away. He returned to England and ultimately resigned his commission.

Instead, what Blair really wanted to do was be a writer. He would ultimately go on to pour out his disdain at his experiences in Burma several times, in the novel Burmese Days and essays A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, but first he turned his attention to the poorest closer to home. To explore this world, and perhaps assuage his own guilt, Blair lived in a rough area of London’s East End and the slums of Paris, working menial jobs and journeying with vagrants. The record of these experiences became Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.

For his pen name, he chose George Orwell, after the River Orwell in Suffolk and Britain’s King George V for a splash of patriotism

For his pen name, he chose George Orwell, after the River Orwell in Suffolk and Britain’s King George V for a splash of patriotism. From then on, he became known as Eric Blair far less with each publication, even among friends, and more as George Orwell. He simultaneously grew more political. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he recorded his time among poor miners in the north of England and dedicated the whole second half of the book to stress how a socialist system could improve their lot.

By the time that was in print Orwell was already fighting his next cause. In late 1936, six months after getting married, he travelled to Spain to take up arms against Franco’s Nationalists. It did not go as hoped: he almost died after being shot in the neck and was forced to flee the country when the Soviet- backed communists turned on their Republican comrades. As expounded in his account Homage to Catalonia (1938), the experience gave Orwell a lifelong dread of communism. And this would only intensify as World War II broke out.

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Poor health denied Orwell the chance to sign up, but he joined the Home Guard and got a job for the BBC working on propaganda pieces to be broadcast in India. He also started writing regularly for the weekly socialist paper, Tribune – directed by MP and eventual NHS founder Aneurin Bevan – and penned reviews and essays, reported on the war, and began work on a new book. It was while in Paris as a war correspondent in the aftermath of the city’s liberation that Orwell heard that his beloved wife, Eileen, had died, not long after the pair had adopted a young child, Richard.

Rounding off an emotionally turbulent period for Orwell, which also saw the end of the war, his new book came out. It was Animal Farm, a fable mirroring the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and it quickly became a commercial success. Orwell, long a political and prolific writer, was now a profitable one, too.

When did Orwell write Nineteen Eighty-Four?

His next book, however, would be Orwell’s last. In 1946, he wrote: “What I have most wanted to do... is to make political writing into an art,” and he did so, but at a cost. With the Animal Farm money, he took a remote house on the island of Jura, in the Inner Hebrides, to work on his dystopian novel filled with terrifying concepts like the Thought Police, doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother. His health failing due to tuberculosis, exacerbated by horror side effects caused by an experimental treatment drug, Orwell worked himself to death, succumbing on 21 January 1950, aged 46 – just months after marrying his second wife, Sonia.

But he had finished the book: Nineteen Eighty-Four. An instant classic, it has managed to maintain a near-unrivalled influence on popular culture and remains a searingly relevant work that has changed how we view, and speak about, the future.