George Orwell: Why is 1984 author buried in Oxfordshire?

At first glance it is unremarkable - no bigger than its surrounding graves or any more elaborate.

But look closer and you will notice coins scattered on top of the headstone, roses left at its base, and letters, gifts and the laminated pages of books decorating the ground below.

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These are left by well-wishers who have travelled to Sutton Courtenay’s All Saints’ parish churchyard to pay tribute at the final resting spot of English novelist George Orwell.

So how did a man who fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Down and Out in Paris and London end up buried in a quaint countryside village?

Orwell was born as Eric Arthur Blair in British India in 1903 and spent his childhood in Henley and Shiplake before moving to Burma to work as a policeman.

Spells in Paris and London followed before he adopted his famous pen name George Orwell in 1932 and published The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937.

He left England to fight in the Spanish Civil War but was badly injured and returned home.

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Fame and notoriety arrived when he published Animal Farm in 1945, and this was followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four in June 1949, less than a year before his death from tuberculosis.

Orwell’s wish to be buried in the nearest grave site to where he died was difficult to fulfil. All the graveyards near the London hospital where he succumbed to his illness were full.

Instead, his long-time friend and newspaper editor David Astor, who lived in Sutton Courtenay, arranged a plot at All Saints to honour Orwell’s love of the English countryside.

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His body was brought from London and buried on January 26, 1950, in a grave that bears no mention of his work or pen name. Astor, who died in 2001, lies in a grave adjacent.

Now, people travel from around the world to pay their respects at Orwell’s grave.

Each year, on the closest Sunday to the writer’s birthday on June 23, the Orwell Society travels there to discuss Orwell’s writings and hold an informal picnic called the ‘1984 Symposium’.

It seems fitting that a writer who risked his life on the battlefront and created terrifying dystopian fiction is laid to rest in such a quiet, idyllic corner of the Oxfordshire countryside.