Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was a British novelist, essayist and journalist. He was born in the city of Motihari in Bihar, India, where his father was working as an opium agent in the Indian civil service. Orwell was most famous for his dystopian works of fiction, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four but he was also a prolific essayist. Many of his essays, including ‘Why I Write' and ‘Politics and the English Language', have remained popular as well. 
Orwell's experiences in the 1930s, including reporting on the living conditions of the poor and the working class as well as fighting as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War formed his political and philosophical outlook. His body of work provides one of the twentieth century's most incisive critiques of totalitarianism.