All posts tagged: Orwell

Ben Lerner says Transcription is ‘not political statement’ despite winning Orwell Prize for political fiction

Ben Lerner says Transcription is ‘not political statement’ despite winning Orwell Prize for political fiction

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter American author Ben Lerner has insisted that his book Transcription does not make a “political statement” after it won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Published in April, Transcription was announced the winner of the 2026 award on Thursday (25 June). The Orwell awards aim to highlight books that meet George Orwell’s own goal “to make political writing into art”, and comes with a cash prize of £5,000. An exploration of technology and storytelling, Transcription begins with an emotional interview between a man and his old mentor, which runs into problems when the man drops his phone – also his recording device – into the sink. “A forensic study of our insatiable appetite for new technology, [Transcription] explores the unreliable stories we tell ourselves about hunger, love and connection,” said judging chair Fiammetta Rocco. “It is about dying with dignity and …

Orwell: Totalitarianism Starts As an Internal Mental State

Orwell: Totalitarianism Starts As an Internal Mental State

Published by Jenni Sidey

On Saturday, I looked at Matt Johnson’s thoughts on George Orwell’s vital but comparatively unknown 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell, famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wanted to “make political writing into an art.” Image Credit: Igor Nikushin – Adobe Stock He was well aware that most competitors for public attention simply wanted to make political writing a reliable form of mass brainwashing. He hoped to find a public that sought an alternative. He published “Prevention” (longish, at 5500 words) in Polemic, a short-lived British intellectual magazine (1945–47), which featured work by such notables as Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Dylan Thomas. Intellectual freedom as “violence” Intellectual freedom, as we have always been told, is only ever one generation away from extinction. While the scene has certainly changed in the last eighty years, the effort to control information is still vigorous. I’ve excerpted a few parts of the essay and offer some update comments: Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which …

Hayek, Orwell, And 'The End Of Truth'

Hayek, Orwell, And 'The End Of Truth'

Published by Jenni Sidey

Hayek, Orwell, And ‘The End Of Truth’ Authored by Jonathan Miltimore via Civitas Institute, In 1942, after fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937), a disillusioned writer returned to London to write about his experience. It wasn’t just that the fascists in Spain had won and his side—a small, anti-Stalinist Marxist group—had lost. What frightened him was the ease with which truth itself had been erased and replaced by propaganda. “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories … and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.” The writer was George Orwell, and the quote appears in his book “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.” The disconnect between reality and narrative clearly made an impression on Orwell, who worried that …

How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

How George Orwell Predicted the Rise of “AI Slop” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Published by José Betancourt

We’ve lived but a few years so far into the age when arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can pro­duce con­vinc­ing sto­ries, songs, essays, poems, nov­els, and even films. For many of us, these recent­ly imple­ment­ed func­tions have already come to feel nec­es­sary in our dai­ly life, but it may sur­prise us to con­sid­er how many peo­ple had long assumed that com­put­ers could already per­form them. That belief sure­ly owes in part to the roles played by effec­tive­ly sen­tient machines in pop­u­lar fic­tions since at least the ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Revis­it­ing George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four, we even find a device very much like today’s large lan­guage mod­els in use at the Min­istry of Truth, the employ­er of pro­tag­o­nist Win­ston Smith. With­in the Min­istry is “a whole chain of sep­a­rate depart­ments deal­ing with pro­le­tar­i­an lit­er­a­ture, music, dra­ma, and enter­tain­ment gen­er­al­ly. Here were pro­duced rub­bishy news­pa­pers con­tain­ing almost noth­ing except sport, crime and astrol­o­gy, sen­sa­tion­al five-cent nov­el­ettes, films ooz­ing with sex, and sen­ti­men­tal songs which were com­posed entire­ly by mechan­i­cal means on a spe­cial kind of kalei­do­scope known …

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back

Leo Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an ‘Insignificant, Inartistic Writer.’ Then George Orwell Fires Back

Published by José Betancourt

After his rad­i­cal con­ver­sion to Chris­t­ian anar­chism, Leo Tol­stoy adopt­ed a deeply con­trar­i­an atti­tude. The vehe­mence of his attacks on the class and tra­di­tions that pro­duced him were so vig­or­ous that cer­tain crit­ics, now most­ly obso­lete, might call his strug­gle Oedi­pal. Tol­stoy thor­ough­ly opposed the patri­ar­chal insti­tu­tions he saw oppress­ing work­ing peo­ple and con­strain­ing the spir­i­tu­al life he embraced. He cham­pi­oned rev­o­lu­tion, “a change of a people’s rela­tion towards Pow­er,” as he wrote in a 1907 pam­phlet, “The Mean­ing of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion”: “Such a change is now tak­ing place in Rus­sia, and we, the whole Russ­ian peo­ple, are accom­plish­ing it.” In that “we,” Tol­stoy aligns him­self with the Russ­ian peas­antry, as he does in oth­er pam­phlets like the 1909-10 jour­nal, “Three Days in the Vil­lage.” These essays and oth­ers of the peri­od rough out a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and cul­tur­al crit­i­cism, often aimed at affirm­ing the rud­dy moral health of the peas­antry and point­ing up the deca­dence of the aris­toc­ra­cy and its insti­tu­tions. In keep­ing with the theme, one of Tolstoy’s pam­phlets, a 1906 essay on Shake­speare, takes …

George Orwell called for a new way of thinking about science

George Orwell called for a new way of thinking about science

Published by skeptic

In October 1945, George Orwell responded to a letter from Mr J. Stewart Cook in the leftwing weekly newspaper Tribune calling for more science education. The call can hardly have come as a surprise. War had brought science and engineering to the fore – from the Spitfire fighter plane and radar to Bletchley Park’s codebreakers – and now that war was over, many thought it was time to build a brave new world. Science had won the war; the view was that it should build the peace. Only the week before, in the same newspaper, Orwell had warned of the dangers posed by the atomic bomb. He was not a pacifist – far from it. But he started off by saying how likely it was that the world would “be blown to pieces by it within the next five years”, and ended with a stark warning against big science. The bigger and more scientific the weapons, Orwell argued, the bigger and more authoritarian the state. And the bigger and more authoritarian the states that held …