Understanding Orwell: The Biographer’s Art
In a special conversation with the critic Liesl Schillinger, the award-winning biographer of Orwell, D.J. Taylor, talks about his exploration of the life of this literary colossus, using all the tools of the biographer’s art, including newly-discovered source material, and conversations with the last few contemporaries of Orwell who are still alive.
Featuring a short film by Sahm McGlynn, commissioned for the festival, featuring Waris Ahulwalia and inspired by “A Nice Cup of Tea”
D.J. Taylor
D. J. Taylor is the author of The Lost Girls; Derby Day (nominated for the Booker Prize); and Orwell: The Life (2003), winner of the Whitbread Biography Award. D. J. is a book critic for several British newspapers and lives in London.
Liesl Schillinger
Liesl Schillinger is a New York–based critic, translator, and moderator. She worked at The New Yorker for more than a decade and became a regular critic for The New York Times Book Review in 2004. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, The New Yorker, Vogue, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She translates fiction and nonfiction from German, French, and Italian; recent novels translated include Every Day, Every Hour by Natasa Dragnic (Viking), and The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas, fils (Penguin Classics). She is the author of the book Wordbirds, an illustrated lexicon of necessary neologisms for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster).