Gordon Bowker

After reading English, Sociology and Philosophy at Nottingham and London Universities Gordon Bowker worked as a lecturer as well as writing dramas and documentaries for radio and television. He has written stories, articles and reviews for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including London Magazine, Plays and Players, The Listener, Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times. He wrote a series of highly-praised film-location reports for the Observer and reported on the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Polish trade union Solidarity for the Illustrated London News. More recently he has concentrated on literary biography. His books include Malcolm Lowry Remembered (1985); Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano (1987); Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1994) (New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell (1996). His biography of George Orwell was published in 2003, the centenary of that writer's birth.

Few writers can boast the brilliant legacy of George Orwell, both in his numerous additions to the English language (Big Brother, Newspeak, Room 101, Doublethink) and his profound influence on world literature. Now, on the centenary of Orwell's birth, Gordon Bowker's excellent new biography brings to life the man behind the words.

In fascinating detail, Bowker describes the remarkable chapters in Orwell's life and draws on a wealth of new material to cast absorbing new light on Orwell's character: his superstitious streak and flirtation with black magic; his complex and sometimes reckless sex life; revealing new evidence of his being hunted and spied on in Spain; the strange circumstances of his first marriage and his deathbed wedding to a women fifteen years his junior.

The portrait that emerges is a writer of undoubted genius but also an individual of curious contradictions: a great European writer with a profound sense of Englishness; a man who championed truth but was deeply deceptive in his own private life; a visionary romantic for whom the economic clarity of his writing was everything. Meticulously researched, Gordon Bowker's biography offers the most fully realised account yet of this most pivotal of literary figures.