George Orwell Trivia
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49 free George Orwell trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This George Orwell trivia quiz covers the life of Eric Arthur Blair, the Old Etonian policeman-turned-tramp who became the twentieth century's most quoted political writer. The easy questions cover the books everyone knows (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), the country he was born in, the war he fought in and the neologisms he gave the language. From there it moves through the biography: the imperial police posting in Burma, dishwashing in Paris, the hop fields of Kent, the tripe shop in Wigan, the sniper's bullet at Huesca and the BBC job he quit to write about pigs. The harder end covers the pseudonyms he rejected, the publishers who turned down Animal Farm, the poodle called Marx, the tea he had shipped to Catalonia, the streptomycin, the hospital-room wedding, and the essay the British Council apologised for rejecting seventy years late. Nothing here is a plot question about the novels themselves; the focus is the man. Every answer was checked against Orwell's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you want the books rather than the biography, our classic literature and banned books quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was George Orwell's real name?
Eric Arthur Blair
Eric Arthur Blair is the name on his gravestone, which reads 'Here lies Eric Arthur Blair' with no mention of George Orwell.
Q 02In which country was Orwell born?
India
India: he was born in Motihari in 1903, and his mother took him to England when he was one year old.
Q 03Orwell's father was a colonial civil servant in which department?
The Opium Department
The Opium Department kept his father abroad, and apart from a brief 1907 visit, Orwell did not see him again for years.
Q 04Which future writer did Orwell first meet at St Cyprian's prep school in Eastbourne?
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly beat him to the school's Harrow History Prize, but later, as editor of Horizon, published several of Orwell's essays.
Q 05When Orwell first met his childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom, what was he doing?
Standing on his head in a field
Standing on his head in a field, he explained, got you noticed far more than being the right way up.
Q 06Which famous novelist taught Orwell French at Eton?
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley later wrote to his former pupil about Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicting rulers would prefer infant conditioning to 'clubs and prisons'.
Q 07Which hard-working Animal Farm character do the pigs sell to the knacker after he collapses?
Boxer
Boxer is carted off in a knacker's van, but Squealer tells the other animals that a vet had bought the van and not yet painted over the old name.
Q 08Which two Orwell essays draw on his Burma police years?
'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant'
'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' both come from Burma, and in the second he admits he shot the elephant 'solely to avoid looking a fool'.
Q 09Which Nineteen Eighty-Four character risks death or a labour camp by secretly keeping a diary?
Winston Smith
Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old news items, so that every Party prediction appears to have come true.
Q 10Which illness did Orwell catch in Burma in 1927, before he resigned to become a writer?
Dengue fever
Dengue fever put him on sick leave from Burma, and he never returned to his police post there.
Q 11Which American writer's book The People of the Abyss inspired Orwell's tramping expeditions?
Jack London
Jack London had lived rough in the East End in 1902, sleeping in workhouses and on the streets, and Orwell copied his method.
Q 12Which menial job did Orwell take at a fashionable Paris hotel?
Dishwashing
Dishwashing in the hotel's cellars, as a lowly plongeur, became the heart of the Paris half of Down and Out in Paris and London.
Q 13Which poet, then at Faber & Faber, rejected the manuscript of Down and Out in Paris and London?
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot turned Orwell down again at Faber twelve years later, when he rejected Animal Farm in 1944.
Q 21Which American novelist told Orwell over dinner in Paris that fighting in Spain was 'sheer stupidity'?
Henry Miller
Henry Miller scoffed at his reasons for going, yet in the 1940 essay 'Inside the Whale' Orwell praised Miller as a rare imaginative talent.
Q 22Which militia did Orwell join in the Spanish Civil War?
The POUM
The POUM took him because he arrived with Independent Labour Party papers, and in June 1937 it was declared illegal and its members hunted.
Q 23Where was Orwell hit by a sniper's bullet in Spain in 1937?
In the throat
In the throat, by a sniper near Huesca, and the wound got him declared medically unfit for further service.
Q 14Which revolutionary song does Old Major teach the animals in Animal Farm?
Beasts of England
Beasts of England is later abolished by a special decree of Napoleon, and the animals are forbidden to sing it.
Q 15Which publisher brought out Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London?
Victor Gollancz
Victor Gollancz took it after Jonathan Cape and then Faber & Faber had turned it down.
Q 16The 'Orwell' in George Orwell was taken from what?
A river in Suffolk
A river in Suffolk, the River Orwell, gave him the surname, which he liked as 'a good round English name'.
Q 17Orwell's job at Booklovers' Corner, a Hampstead second-hand bookshop, informed which novel?
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
He worked afternoons, wrote in the mornings and lodged with the shop's Esperantist owners.
Q 18In Wigan in 1936, Orwell lodged in dirty rooms above what?
A tripe shop
A tripe shop sat below the squalid lodgings that fill the opening chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier.
Q 19The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937 for which subscription scheme?
The Left Book Club
The Left Book Club edition carried a nervous preface from the publisher, who feared the book's second half would offend members.
Q 20Whom did Orwell marry on 9 June 1936?
Eileen O'Shaughnessy
Eileen O'Shaughnessy met him at his landlady's party in 1935, and in the Spanish Civil War she typed in the ILP office while he fought.
Q 24Which invented language in Nineteen Eighty-Four is designed to make rebellious thoughts literally unthinkable?
Newspeak
Newspeak drew on Basic English, the 850-word simplified English that Orwell once championed and later turned against.
Q 25Which book came out of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War?
Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia was a commercial flop in 1938 and found its readers only in the 1950s, after Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Q 26Which pig does Napoleon drive off Animal Farm with his dogs?
Snowball
Snowball is then blamed for everything that goes wrong, even the collapse of the windmill he had designed.
Q 27Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air while wintering for his health in which country?
Morocco
Morocco was a half-year escape from the English winter, secretly paid for by the novelist L. H. Myers.
Q 28During the Second World War, Orwell worked for which organisation?
The BBC
The BBC's Broadcasting House had a Room 101, which is said to have inspired the torture chamber in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Q 29Which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale did Orwell adapt for radio in 1943?
The Emperor's New Clothes
The Emperor's New Clothes aired in November 1943, and in 1945 he subtitled Animal Farm 'A Fairy Story'.
Q 30Orwell's regular personal column in Tribune, begun in December 1943, was called what?
As I Please
As I Please ran while he was Tribune's literary editor, a job he left in early 1945 to report from Europe for The Observer.