Full Name: George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair); Profession: English novelist, essayist, journalist, and literary critic best known for the political fable "Animal Farm" and the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four"; Nationality: English (British); Born: 25 June 1903; Birthplace: Motihari, Bengal, British India (now Motihari, Bihar, India), where his father served in the Indian Civil Service’s Opium Department; Generation: Greatest Generation (G.I. Generation), the cohort generally defined as people born from 1901 to 1927 who came of age amid the Great Depression and the Second World War; Chinese Zodiac: Water Rabbit, as 1903 falls in the Year of the Water Rabbit in the Chinese horoscope cycle. Zodiac Sign: Cancer, since all those born on June 25 are under the sign of Cancer; Age in 2026: 123 (he would have turned 123 years old on 25 June 2026 if he were still alive). Marital Status: He was married twice—first to Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936 (a deeply influential partner in his life and work until she died in 1945) and later to Sonia Brownell in 1949—and died a married man after being widowed and remarried. Children: One adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair (born 14 May 1944), whom Orwell and Eileen adopted during the Second World War and raised in England. Description: George Orwell was an influential 20th‑century English writer whose stark, lucid prose and uncompromising political vision made him one of the most important literary voices on totalitarianism, social injustice, and the corruption of language in modern history. Educated in England but born in colonial India, he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma before rejecting imperial service, an experience that profoundly shaped his anti‑imperialist convictions and provided material for works such as "Burmese Days" and key essays criticizing empire and authoritarian power. Often drawn to the lives of the poor and dispossessed, he deliberately immersed himself in poverty in Paris and London, transforming those experiences into the part‑memoir, part‑reportage book "Down and Out in Paris and London," which blended personal narrative with acute social observation and helped establish his distinctive documentary style. His time in industrial northern England during the 1930s produced "The Road to Wigan Pier," a searing examination of working‑class conditions and the failures of both capitalism and conventional middle‑class socialism, revealing his lifelong concern with economic inequality and the moral responsibilities of intellectuals. Politically, Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side and was nearly killed there, later chronicling the chaos, factionalism, and betrayal he witnessed in "Homage to Catalonia," a book that deepened his suspicion of authoritarian communism as well as fascism and led him toward a fiercely independent democratic socialism. With "Animal Farm" (1945), he created an allegorical farmyard fable that exposed how revolutionary ideals in the Soviet Union had been betrayed by Stalinism, compressing complex political history into a simple yet devastating narrative that quickly became a modern classic. He followed it with "Nineteen Eighty‑Four" (1949), an anti‑utopian novel depicting a surveillance state where history is rewritten, language is weaponized through "Newspeak," and independent thought is crushed, a vision so powerful that terms like "Big Brother," "thoughtcrime," and "Orwellian" have entered everyday language as symbols of modern political and technological dangers. Beyond these famous novels, Orwell wrote countless essays and reviews that combined literary criticism, political commentary, and personal reflection, setting a standard for clear, morally engaged prose and making him, in the words of many critics, a kind of conscience of his generation. Cause of Death: Orwell died on 21 January 1950 at University College Hospital in London, aged 46, from complications of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, including a fatal pulmonary artery rupture, after several years of deteriorating health despite treatment such as streptomycin.