Authors
Ron Bateman
Ron Bateman was born in Swindon, Wiltshire. UK in 1961. He commenced his working life at the British Rail Engineering Workshops in Swindon, where he completed a four-year engineering apprenticeship in 1981. For the next 22 years he worked for a large company manufacturing surgical implants and, for much of that time, was active in the field of industrial relations at both Domestic and European levels.
In the mid-1990s Ron gained a BSc Honours degree in Psychology with the Open University and went on to complete a diploma in European Humanities. Apart from his keen interest in George Orwell; both the man and his works, he has been writing for around 15 years, ‘mainly for enjoyment’ and has published several travel articles. He is currently working on a book about the demise and closure of the famous Great Western Railways Works in Swindon.
Richard Blair
Richard Blair was born in London in 1944. At a few weeks old he was adopted by the writer George Orwell and his wife Eleanor who died unexpectedly shortly afterwards. He was brought up on the Island of Jura, Scotland where Orwell had gone to write Nineteen Eighty Four, and after Orwell’s death in 1950, his guardians became his aunt Avril Blair, and Bill Dunn whom she subsequently married. Richard was educated in Scotland at Loretto school and this was followed by two agricultural colleges in Wiltshire and Aberdeen, resulting in a farming career. In the mid 1970s he joined Massey-Ferguson until redundancy in 1986 made him change direction. That year he bought four small cottages in Scotland and turned them into holiday lets. This proved to have been a good move and he built four more and was happy with their management until 2008 when he retired and sold them.
Richard and Eleanor have two sons and three grandchildren and are now enjoying their retirement, boating and travelling. He is also involved with the Orwell Awards Committee as a Trustee and contributer.
Gordon Bowker
After working in Australia and the Middle East, Gordon Bowker studied at Nottingham and London Universities before teaching at Goldsmith’s College and writing drama-documentaries for radio and television. He has contributed to The London Magazine, Independent, Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Times. He has written film-location reports for The Observer (including Huston’s Under the Volcano and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) and dispatches from Berlin and Warsaw for the Illustrated London News. His books include Malcolm Lowry Remembered (1985); 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 George Orwell appeared in 2003, that author’s centenary year.
Jacintha Buddicom
ERIC & US was written after Jacintha, always acknowledged to have been the childhood muse of George Orwell, was asked, in 1970, to write the opening article for an anthology of The Great Man's life (The World of George Orwell). She quickly realised that there was so much more to their shared lives than there had been room to illustrate that, when publisher Leslie Frewin suggested she might like to write her own book on the subject, she was delighted to agree.
Jacintha Buddicom was essentially a poet. As a result, this little memoir is filled with the music of language as well as the fascination of watching a brilliant 11 year-old boy evolving into adulthood bearing the bruises of romantic rejection as well as the scars of parental mishandling.
Jacintha was the eldest of three, born in 1901 as the Edwardian era moved on from Victorian ethics towards the horrors of the First World War. So secure was the sheltered world of their upbringing that that most terrible of world wars scarcely seemed to touch their lives. The three Buddicoms and two younger Blairs developed together, Jacintha and Eric almost inseparable as they explored the occult – Fabian writers – and became teenagers. Their poetry was their intimacy, and Jacintha's fascination with words and what could be done with them met a momentous champion in Eric's brilliant understanding and constant challenge.
Jacintha, two years older than Eric but a tiny elegant figure beside his fast-growing person, rejected his romantic overtures and when, after school, his father sent him to join the Imperial Police in Burma, they lost touch when she stopped writing to him. He saw something of her brother and sister on his return 5 years later – but Jacintha was busy elsewhere and the idyllic relationship was lost.
It was not until 1949, twenty seven years later, and only a few months before his death in 1950 that Jacintha suddenly discovered that Eric was, in fact, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four and many other notable books. She wrote to him immediately and for a very few poignant months they returned to those magical days of their youth, addressing each other in their secret way, with even a rueful complaint from Orwell that she had ‘abandoned him to Burma'.
This small but gifted Edwardian spent her life as a poet. She did not marry and came to regard cats as being more faithful friends than human beings, writing a book of cat poems which is still valued today by those who think the same way. Jacintha died in 1993, leaving behind her this delicate portrayal of the childhood and youth of two exceptional young people.
Professor Sir Bernard Crick
PROFESSOR SIR BERNARD CRICK, political theorist and democratic socialist whose biography George Orwell: A Life (1982) was the first authorised biography, written at the behest of Orwell’s widow Sonia Brownell. Among his many important works he is perhaps also known for his classic book In Defence of Politics (1962) and for his inspirational link with both the George Orwell Memorial Trust and the Orwell Prize from their inceptions. Who better fitted to launch The Blair/Orwell Essay and Forum than this dedicated guardian of the Orwell ethos. Sir Bernard Crick died in Edinburgh on the 19th December 2008.
Peter Davison OBE, PhD, D.Litt, Hon. D. Arts
PROFESSOR Peter Davison, having spent nearly 25 years compiling The Complete Works of George Orwell in 20 volumes, has also written another six books with Orwell as subject. He must be regarded, therefore, as one of the prime sources of knowledge concerning this great socio-political literary genius of the 20th century.
Professor Davison, having been appointed a Fellowship at the Shakespeare Institute, worked at the University of Birmingham and lectured at universities worldwide, including Australia and the United States. In 1991 he joined the newly-created De Montfort University in Leicester as a Research Professor. He was awarded the OBE in 1999 and also in the same year D.Litt. and Hons.D. Arts degrees. In 2009 he was appointed Emeritus Professor of English at Glyndŵr University.
In 2006 his supplement to the Complete Works of George Orwell, The Lost Orwell was published by Timewell Press, and in September 2009 Harvill Secker published his edition of Orwell’s Diaries. Penguin will publish that in paperback in June 2010. In April 2010 his 29th book devoted to Orwell, A Life in Letters, will be published by Harvill Secker and that, too, is scheduled to appear in paperback from Penguin in January 2011. In 2003 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society.
His latest book George Orwell: Diaries was published in 2009, and can be purchased through a click link with Amazon on the book cover in our Home Page
Dr William Hunt
Dr William (Liam) Hunt taught History at St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY from 1981 – 2008. He has published two books so far. The Puritan Movement 1985 Harvard University Press, and Reviving England’s Revolution, 1988. He is presently researching a work on the influence to his work of the beginning and final years of George Orwell’s life.
Dr Hunt’s interests and commitments include Summer Programs in Bosnia, The History of Modern Poland, the Decline of the Soviet Empire. He publishes poetry in the Atlantic Monthly and has been from 1989 – 2009 the Founder/Director of the St. Lawrence University Solidarity Project whose mission is to foster the culture of democracy in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Douglas Kerr
Douglas Kerr, although from Scotland, was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick in the United Kingdom. He has worked for most of his academic life at the University of Hong Kong, where he is Professor in the School of English.
His publications include Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Clarendon Press 1993) George Orwell (Writers and Their Work series, 2003), and A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s, co-edited with Julia Kuehn(Hong Kong University press, 2007), besides essays on Conrad, Kipling, Leonard Woolf, Auden and Isherwood, Graham Greene etc. He is a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.
John Rodden
Professor Rodden has taught at the Universities of Virginia and Texas at Austin, USA and authored or edited several books on Orwell, including
- The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (1989)
- Understanding ‘Animal Farm’ in Historical Content (1999)
- Scenes from an Afterlife: the Legacy of George Orwell (2003)
- George Orwell into the Twenty-First Century (2004)
- Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (2006)
- The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (2007)
John Rodden’s next book is tentatively titled The Unexamined Orwell. He is also under contract to Cambridge University Press to publish a new introduction to Orwell’s life and work in 20010.
Loraine Saunders
Loraine taught English as a foreign language in Brazil, Germany and Poland after graduating from university. She went on to complete her PhD in English literature at Liverpool University and then taught at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and currently Hope Liverpool. Having just had her first book published, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell (see above) she is currently pursuing further subjects.
Peter Stansky
Frances and Charles Field professor of History, Emeritus Peter Stansky has had a long and varied career in American and British history. Educated at Yale, King’s College, Cambridge and Harvard he majored in History, finally settling at Stanford in 1973.
His many Awards and Fellowships include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, President, North American Conference on British Studies, and twice Chairman of the Conference on British Publications Committee, to name but a few. As the author and co-author of more than twenty books, the last book published in 2008 was The First Day of the Blitz.
In 1972 Peter Stansky with William Abrahams wrote The Unknown Orwell, and followed it up in 1979 with Orwell: The Transformation. The essay that Professor Stansky has written for The Orwell Essay & Forum relates his search with William Abrahams for details of Orwell’s activities in Spain and beyond.
DJ Taylor
DJ Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of six novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. His latest novel Bright Young People was published in 2007 and his recently completed Alice is due out in the Spring of 2009. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit Britiish Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945: and an acclaimed biography Thackeray. D.J.Taylor’s critically commended Orwell biography Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction. In 2008 Taylor succeeded Sir Bernard Crick to become the second Chair of the Orwell Trust. He is married with three children and still lives in Norwich.
Dione Venables
The three Buddicoms in Eric & Us were the children of Dione Venables's aunt Laura Finlay. Dione, who lives near Chichester, West Sussex, the author of seven historical novels, sometime BBC broadcaster and miniaturist, had been in the habit of writing a daily diary for very many years, and recording all interesting conversations with senior members of her family. She has a keen interest in genealogy and realized how important it is to listen to everything that elderly relations have to say about their past - because therein lie the details of family history.
It is for this reason that she has been able, with the blessing of involved members of her family, to contribute the Postscript, which is the key to the hidden agenda of Eric & Us, using her diary notes and researching where possible for verification.
Jacintha was headlined in the Press in 1972 as “The Girl Who Jilted Orwell”. The Postscript relates the poignant events that actually occurred, causing George Orwell to erase his closest childhood friends from his personal history, though the echo of them lives on in many of his characters.