THE ORWELL FESTIVAL 2025
BLOOMSBURY, LONDON
Illustration by André Carrilho for the New Statesman
“WHAT I HAVE MOST WANTED TO DO… IS TO MAKE POLITICAL WRITING INTO AN ART.”
The Orwell Festival is an annual series of events in Bloomsbury, London, culminating in the announcement of the winners of The Orwell Prizes.
In the spirit of George Orwell’s fiction, non-fiction and journalism, the Orwell Foundation aims to celebrate honest and creative writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives, and confront uncomfortable truths. We take seriously Orwell’s injunction that ‘if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
The Orwell Festival aims to be a space for difficult debate and diversity of opinion and viewpoints, encourage creativity and clarity of expression, provide a platform for unheard voices and defend the right to individual conscience, whilst remaining politically impartial.
The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity, dedicated to supporting and nurturing the writers and journalists who share Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’, in this generation and the next. Friends of the Foundation receive exclusive benefits, including two complimentary tickets to the Festival. Visit our website to find out more about our work.