Rebecca Solnit on Orwell’s Roses

Our guest this week is the wonderful Rebecca Solnit discussing Orwell’s Roses, her fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.

Buy Orwell’s Roses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781783788620/orwells-roses

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

*

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

• An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
• The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
• Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
• And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

*

From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage inHertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell's motivations and drives -and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision - and open up a profound mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world.

Tracking Orwell's impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys toEngland and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell's life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell's Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, which finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.

*

Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books, Call Them By Their True Names, The Mother of All Questions, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning River of Shadows and A Paradise Built in Hell. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

Listen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.