Following in the footsteps of one of the world’s literary heroes, speaker Oliver Lewis set out to visit all the places that inspired and shaped George Orwell, beginning in Northern India where Orwell was born in 1903 and ending at his final resting place in Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire. Over three years, he travelled from Wigan to Catalonia, Paris to Motihari, Marrakesh to Eton, and in each location explored both how Orwell experienced the place, and how the place now remembers him as a literary icon.
Oliver Lewis is a travel writer and historian. He specialises in the ‘literary travelogue’, first with ‘The Orwell Tour’ (2023), the second with the ‘Steinbeck Odyssey’. In a separate capacity he is almost at the end of a Doctorate in Modern British History at the University of Oxford, where he researches the privatisation of British Rail ‘as a case study in Public Policy Failure’. He teaches undergraduate history and politics at Oxford and at Sciences Po, Paris, where he resides each spring.
