Sixty years after his death, George Orwell has emerged as the favourite Penguin author of current Penguin authors, after 50 writers including Will Self, David Lodge and Naomi Klein were asked to pick their favourite title to celebrate the publisher's 75th anniversary.
Four of the 50 books chosen were by Orwell – more than by any other writer. Paul Theroux picked his novel about the last days of British imperialism, Burmese Days, which he felt helped him "understand how [he] might write about Africa and South East Asia", James Lovelock plumped for his dystopian allegory Animal Farm ("the evergreen guide book for dystopia"), Catherine O'Flynn chose his vision of a totalitarian future, 1984, and Norman Stone went for his essay, Shooting an Elephant.
The four Orwell titles, along with the 46 other Penguin books selected by Penguin authors, will be featured as part of a promotion at Waterstone's. "George Orwell was a master of social and political commentary," said the bookseller's fiction buyer Janine Cook. "It's no surprise he's the most chosen author from within the Penguin ranks. He is one of the most powerful voices in 20th century literature. His work is as relevant now as it was when it was written."
Nick Hornby and Claire Tomalin are the only two authors both to have chosen books for the promotion and to have been selected themselves. Elizabeth Buchan picked Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, saying that the "passionate, radical, brave, and sometimes difficult" subject "could not have wished for a more empathetic and brilliantly skilled biographer", while chick-lit author Catherine Alliott selected Hornby's High Fidelity, calling it "the ultimate modern classic [with] so much insight into the male psyche it should be required reading".
Hornby himself chose Geoffrey Willans's much-loved schoolboy tale, Molesworth, while Tomalin plumped for an older choice: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Hugh Sebag-Montefiore also picked a Tolstoy novel – War and Peace – while novelist Evelyn Waugh was also chosen twice, for Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited.
Penguin was set up in 1935 by Allen Lane with the aim of making quality fiction available at a reasonable price. The first Penguin paperbacks, by the likes of Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway, cost just sixpence; Orwell said at the time that "the Penguin Books are splendid value ... so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them".
The Penguin authors' Penguin selections in full
1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - Claire Tomalin
2. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh - David Lodge
3. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin - Elizabeth Buchan
4. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - Lynn Barber
5. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis - Harry Sidebottom
6. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca - Nicolas Nassim Taleb
7. Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd - Steven Pinker
8. Love by Stendhal - Alain de Botton
9. The Go-Between by LP Hartley - Ali Smith
10. The Collected Works of Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker - Elizabeth Noble
11. Burmese Days by George Orwell - Paul Theroux
12. Couples by John Updike - Helen Dunmore
13. Regeneration by Pat Barker - Marina Lewycka
14. A Legacy by Sybille Bedford - Zoë Heller
15. The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze - Antony Beevor
16. The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe - Naomi Alderman
17. 1984 by George Orwell - Catherine O'Flynn
18. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey - Iain Sinclair
19. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee - Roger McGough
20. The Fall by Albert Camus - Mohsin Hamid
21. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides - Andrew Roberts
22. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh - Ian Kershaw
23. Ways of Seeing by John Berger - Naomi Klein
24. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding - Jonathan Coe
25. Americana by Don Dellilo - Joshua Ferris
26. War of the Worlds by HG Wells - Will Self
27. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend - Marian Keyes
28. Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans - Nick Hornby
29. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford - Jane Green
30. Animal Farm by George Orwell - James Lovelock
31. The Tale Of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter - John Nichol
32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank - Mark Bostridge
33. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - Jane Fallon
34. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby - Catherine Alliott
35. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol - John Lanchester
36. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - Lesley Pearse
37. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
38. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Nicci French
39. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allen
Poe - Dick and Felix Francis
40. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell - Norman Stone
41. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov - William Boyd
42. A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine - Sophie Hannah
43. The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins - Andrew Taylor
44. The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor - Saul David
45. Collapse by Jared Diamond - Tristram Stuart
46. Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys - David Thomson
47. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - Chris Patten
48. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - Patrick Hennessey
49. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - John Gray
50. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope - Robin Lane Fox