The British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), was one of the most influential voices of the 20th century, thanks to two sharp satires attacking totalitarianism and essays marked by unaligned socialist thinking and crisp prose. Animal Farm (1945) denounces the betrayal of revolutionary ideals under the guise of a fable involving pigs; Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) decries the trend towards totalitarianism, i.e. an ‘Orwellian’ world; both works have been published in Thai.
   Born in Bengal but educated at Eton College, Orwell was for much of his life a destitute and jack-of-all-trades, from tramp and beggar to dishwasher, from colonial cop in Burma (1922-27) to teacher, from volunteer fighter in the Spanish civil war to shopkeeper, from BBC talk producer to investigative reporter to war correspondent to independent writer. A widower, he remarried practically on his deathbed. He died of tuberculosis.
   ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is the best known of his stories from his experience as a police district superintendent in Burma, along with his novel Burmese Days (1934). It bears his hallmark handling of big themes beyond the merely anecdotic.