Laura Beers: Orwell's Ghost
About the Book: For the 75th anniversary of 1984, Laura Beers explores George Orwell’s still-radical ideas and why they are critical today.
George Orwell dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own—rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies—make his writing even more of the moment. Invocations of Orwell and his classic dystopian novel 1984 have reached new heights, with both sides of the political spectrum embracing the rhetoric of Orwellianism.
In Orwell’s Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell’s full body of work—his six novels, three nonfiction works, and brilliant essays on politics, language, and the class system—to examine what “Orwellian” truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell’s writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of “fake news” and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism and the oppressive nature of the British Empire, and, in contrast, analyzes his failure to understand feminism.
Timely, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking, Orwell’s Ghosts investigates how the writings of a lionized champion of truth and freedom can help us face the crises of modernity. Orwell’s Ghosts was awarded the LA Times Book Prize for Biography and the Shorenstein Center’s Goldsmith Book Prize and named a best book of the year by the New Yorker.
About the Author: Laura Beers is Professor of British History at American University in Washington, DC. She holds an MA and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and a BA from Princeton University. She is an award-winning author of three books: Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton/Hurst, 2024).
Her writing has appeared in the New Republic, the Washington Post, CNN.com, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other venues. She is a frequent contributor for the BBC.
She currently holds a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work on a history of the politics of artificial reproduction since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978.
About the Conversation Partner: Jane Greenway Carr is an editor, writer, and scholar. She is the co-editor of The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings: Tales of a Newspaper Woman (2024), the first collection of the writings of journalist, editor, novelist, and suffrage activist Elizabeth Garver Jordan. She is the former senior ideas editor at CNN Opinion, where she steered social and cultural commentary for nearly a decade and was a recipient of the 2024 New York Press Club Journalism Award for online commentary.
Prior to CNN, she was an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow at the think tank New America, has been a lecturer at New York University, and was the founding editor of The Brooklyn Quarterly, an online magazine of literature and ideas. She holds an AB from Princeton University, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from New York University. She is on the faculty at Manhattanville University and her writing has appeared in publications including CNN, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other journalistic and scholarly venues.