The Orwell Foundation organises free public lectures and debates. There are currently two annual Orwell Lectures: the Orwell Lecture at University College London and, from 2017, the Orwell Lecture in the North at the
University of Sheffield.
Previous Orwell Lectures • 1989: "Big Brother, Big Sister and Today's Media" –
Bruce Kent • 1990: "Must Revolutions Fail?" –
Sir Ralf Dahrendorf • 1991: "Fiction and Agnosticism" –
Penelope Lively • 1992: "Socialist Values" –
Robin Cook • 1993: "Changing the Legal Culture" –
Helena Kennedy • 1994: "But is it Socialism?" –
Roy Hattersley • 1995: "Risk" –
Anthony Giddens • 1996: "The Ministry of Agriculture: The Ministry of Truth" –
Richard Lacey • 1997: "Inside the Whale: the Relationship between the State and the Individual" –
Frank Field • 1998: "Orwell's 'little list'" –
Peter Davison • 1999: "The English Problem: National Identity and Citizenship" –
Sir Bernard Crick • 2000: "Nation, State and Globalisation" –
Martin Wolf • 2001: "House of Memory and London's Orbital Motorway" –
Iain Sinclair • 2002:
Patrick Wright • 2003: "From Authority to Celebrity – Intellectuals in Modern Britain" –
Stefan Collini • 2004: "Just Law: The changing fact of justice and why it matters" –
Helena Kennedy • 2005: "Projections of the inner 'I': George Orwell's Fiction" –
D.J. Taylor • 2006: "Homo Brittanicus, Soctophobia and All That" –
Neal Ascherson • 2007: "The Politics of Response – Orwell's contribution to the questions of how we read and what reading is for" –
Michael Rosen • 2008: "The English" –
Andrew O'Hagan • 2009: "'More like a castle than a realm': Thomas Cromwell's Radical England" –
Hilary Mantel • 2010: "Orwell and the Oligarchs" –
Ferdinand Mount • 2011: "Hacking away at the truth: an investigation and its consequences" –
Alan Rusbridger • 2012: "Secrets of the Cuban Missile Crisis" –
Christopher Andrew • 2013: "Democratising the Middle East: A New Role for the West" –
Tariq Ramadan • 2014: "'Whatever Happened to Social Mobility'" –
David Kynaston • 2015: "War, Words and Reason: Orwell and Thomas Merton on the Crises of Language" –
Dr Rowan Williams • 2016: "The Right to Dissent (and the Left too)" –
Ian Hislop • 2017: "Orwell with women" –
A. L. Kennedy • 2017
: "Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism – Our Divided Politics" –
Ruth Davidson (
The Orwell Prize Shortlist Lecture) • 2018: "Unbecoming British: Citizenship, Migration and the Transformation of Rights into Privileges" –
Kamila Shamsie • 2019: "How To Predict An Election" -
Daniel Finkelstein • 2020: "Decolonising the Wonder House: Orwell, Empire and the Museum" -
Dr Tristram Hunt • 2021: "Politics and the Imagination: Reflection's on Orwell's Inside the Whale" -
Ian McEwan • 2022: "Wigan, the World and Everywhere In Between: How We Build a Country That Works" -
Lisa Nandy MP • 2025: Victoria Amelina -
Looking at Women, Looking at War ; Donal Ryan - Heart Be at Peace (Doubleday) Jenny Kleeman - Journalism Previous Orwell Lecture in the North • 2017: "I've read all the academic texts on empathy" –
Grayson Perry == Orwell's legacy ==