George Orwell's Elephant & Other Essays (Paperback or Softback)

George Orwell's Elephant & Other Essays is the latest collection from Subhash Jaireth, one of Australia's most distinctive and intellectually adventurous essayists. Born in Punjab and trained as a geologist in Soviet-era Moscow before migrating to Australia in 1986, Jaireth brings a rare double vision to his work - the precision of a scientist and the sensitivity of a poet - as he explores the layers of memory, meaning, and history embedded in landscape.

The eight essays in this collection take the reader on an extraordinary journey across continents and deep time. The title essay interrogates George Orwell's famous account of shooting an elephant in Burma, probing the ambiguities of colonialism, truth, and self-invention. Other essays traverse Uluru and the ancient stories of Anangu country, the waterways of Canberra and their Indigenous histories, the windmills of La Mancha, the grandeur of Stalin's Moscow Metro, a fateful bridge on the Punjab border, the streets of Delhi, and the deep-time story of an old banksia tree in Jaireth's own garden.

Assisted by artsACT and published by Gazebo Books, this is a work of calm erudition and quiet wonder - a meditation on what it means to read the world around us, and to be read by it in return.

Subhash Jaireth was born in Punjab, India. Between 1969 and 1978 he spent nine years in Russia studying geology and Russian literature. In 1986 he migrated to Australia. He has published poetry in Hindi, English and Russian.His published works include three books of poems: Golee Lagne se Pahle (Before the Bullet Hit Me) (Vani Prakashan, 1994); Unfinished Poems for Your Violin (Penguin Australia, 1996); Yashodhara: Six Seasons Without You (Wild Peony, 2003); and five books of prose fiction and non-fiction: To Silence: Three Autobiographies (Puncher & Wattmann, 2011); After Love (Transit Lounge, 2012); Moments (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014); Incantations (Recent Work Press, 2016).His most recent books include a collection of essays titled Spinoza's Overcoat: Travels with Writers and Poets (Transit Lounge, 2020), which won the 2021 ACT Book of the Year, a book of translation from Hindi, Rain Clouds: Love Songs of Meerabai (Recent Work Press, 2020), Aflame (Gazebo Books/Life Before Man, 2021), and George Orwell's Elephant and Other Essays (Gazebo Books, 2024).