![]() It is such a dystopian vision of what might happen in the future and yet it was written in such a beautiful place. I was intrigued by the idea that George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in such a beautiful location. ![]() I walked the track up past Ardlussa and saw the house but only from the outside. Norman Bissell (NB): “I first visited Barnhill, I think in 2007. You can order a copy of Barnhill direct from the publishers here or from Islay’s independent bookstore The Celtic House Norman at Barnhill with what’s left of the motorbike Orwell used to get around “It’s no accident that Nineteen Eighty-Four again became an American bestseller when Trump was elected.” Norman Bissell To mark the publication of the paperback, I chatted to Norman about how he went about bringing those final years to life, his insights into the writer’s personality and the abiding relevance of Orwell’s ideas in the era of Trump and Boris Johnson. The novel was nine years in the making for Bissell, a former teacher and trade union official turned poet, screen writer and … shopkeeper: Norman and his partner Birgit run a post office and community shop on Luing, a small island just a short boat ride from Jura. Honoured to have my comment featured on the paperback cover!īarnhill covers Orwell’s final years in London, Paris and Jura and the sacrifices he made - most tragically in terms of his health - as he created the dystopian world of Winston Smith and Julia, Big Brother and the Thought Police. The human story of those dramatic final years is reimagined in Norman Bissell’s novel Barnhill, which we showcased at the 2019 Islay Book Festival, and has just been released in paperback by Luath Press. It was in this beautiful but sometimes bleak Hebridean setting that an ailing George Orwell struggled to transform the masterpiece he had in his mind into a manuscript he was to see published just months before he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 46. Barnhill, the Jura farmhouse where Nineteen Eighty-Four was born.
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