Which author wrote 1984?

George Orwell, finishing it in 1948 on the island of Jura while dying of tuberculosis - typing the final draft himself, in bed, because he could not find a typist willing to come to the Hebrides. He died about seven months after publication, aged 46.

The book's real subject is language rather than surveillance, which is the half people forget. Newspeak is designed so that dissent becomes unthinkable for want of words to think it in, and the appendix - written in the past tense, describing Newspeak as a historical curiosity - quietly implies the regime eventually fell. Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, two years earlier, is the same argument without the plot: that sloppy language and dishonest politics feed each other.

He had earned the right to it. He had been shot through the throat fighting fascism in Spain, and then watched Soviet-aligned forces turn on his own faction and rewrite what had happened - the experience that made him an anti-Stalinist socialist for the rest of his life. Almost everything in the book about the past being continuously revised comes from having seen it done to events he was present at. The irony he would have hated is that Orwellian is now used mostly by people describing their opponents.