Orwell Festival of Political Writing 2022: 'Orwell and Nature'

We were delighted to welcome Rebecca Solnit to deliver the opening Orwell Festival Lecture on 22nd June 2022 for the inaugural Orwell Festival of Political Writing, in partnership with Substack and with support from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL. The opening Orwell Festival Lecture was set up in partnership with the London Review of Books.

In this lecture, Rebecca Solnit discusses the themes arising from her most recent book, 'Orwell’s Roses', which explores Orwell’s involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and how they illuminated his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. James Butler, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, who has written about gardens and gardening in the latest issue, responded to her lecture before inviting questions from the floor.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses. Her memoir, 'Recollections of My Non-Existence', was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award. She is also the author of 'The Faraway Nearby', 'Wanderlust', 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost', 'A Paradise Built in Hell', 'Men Explain Things to Me' and many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope and the climate crisis. She writes is a frequent contributor to the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

The Orwell Festival brings together the shortlisted writers for The Orwell Prizes 2022, along with some special guests, in a series of events to discuss the most important and exciting political thinking and writing today.

In the spirit of George Orwell’s fiction, non-fiction and journalism, The Orwell Foundation aims to celebrate honest and creative writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives, and confront uncomfortable truths. We take seriously Orwell’s injunction that if ‘Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

As such, the Orwell Festival will be a space for difficult debate and diversity of opinion and viewpoints, encourage creativity and clarity of expression, provide a platform for unheard voices, and defend the right to individual conscience, whilst remaining politically impartial.

The Orwell Foundation would like to thank all our partners and sponsors: Substack, University College London, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Political Quarterly, A. M. Heath and George Orwell's son Richard Blair.