Join Phillipe Sands, author of The Last Colony (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2023), Douglas Kerr, author of Orwell and Empire, and Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon Wealth (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2022) as they explore first what Kerr calls Orwell's "creative quarrel" with imperialism, and how it can shine a light on contemporary debates about the legacy of the British Empire, which Koram and Sands have both explored in their Orwell Prize-listed books.
Orwell's relationship to the British Empire was close, fraught and lifelong. Born in India, as a young man he served as an imperial policeman in Burma, where some of his most celebrated early writings are set, from A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant to his first novel, Burmese Days. He returned to England an ardent anti-imperialist: by his own account, it was the very 'hatred' of colonial rule he developed in Burma which inspired him to re-examine social conditions in England. Recently, critics have begun to explore the connections between Orwell's imperial experiences and the anti-authoritarianism which runs through all his work, from The Road to Wigan Pier to Nineteen Eighty-Four – as well as to examine the limits to his anti-imperialism.
In The Last Colony, Philippe Sands relates the relatively little-known case of Britain's forcible deportation of Chagossian Islanders from their home to Mauritius in 1973. In doing so, he explores the long tail of colonialism, and the way the legacy of the British Empire impacted, and impacts, political and legal decisions right up to our current day.
About the speakers
Douglas Kerr is Honorary Professor of English at University of Hong Kong and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. His first book was about the war poet Wilfred Owen and much of his later work studies English literature about the East in colonial and postcolonial times. He is also the author of Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (OUP, 2013) and is general editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Conan Doyle. His most recent book is Orwell and Empire (OUP, 2022).
Kojo Koram is a writer and an academic, teaching at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in Accra, Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in November 2011. In addition to his academic writing, he has written for the New Statesman, the Guardian, Dissent, The Nation, and The Washington Post and has appeared on CNN and Sky News. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line (Pluto Press 2019) and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022).
Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at UCL and a practising barrister at at 11 Kings Bench Walk. He has been involved in many of the most important international cases of recent years, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Guantanamo and the Rohingya. He is the author of Lawless, Torture Team, East West Street, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction, and Sunday Times bestselling The Ratline. He is a contributor to the Financial Times, Guardian, New York Review of Books and Vanity Fair, and makes regular appearances on radio and television. He is President of English PEN and a member of the board of the Hay Festival.