The Farmer's Guide to Animal Farm

Available for over a year

George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published 80 years ago this week. It’s often interpreted as a satire of Soviet communism under Stalin. But to mark its anniversary writer and academic Lisa Mullen seeks out a new perspective by asking, what if we read it as a book about farming instead? As Lisa travels from the rich sandy loam of East Anglia to the hill farms of the Cotswolds, George Orwell emerges as a man committed to life as a smallholder, and as a writer deeply involved in the agricultural debates of the 20th century – debates that have shaped the English countryside as it is today. With contributors Nathan Waddell, Professor of 20th Century Literature at the University of Birmingham and author of A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell; Ian Wilkinson, co-founder and director of FarmED; Melissa Abbot, Growing Officer at the Food Museum, Stowmarket; Dr Ollie Douglas, Curator at the Museum of English Rural life in Reading; Dr Sophie Scott Brown, Fellow of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews and author of The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain Producer: Luke Mulhall