Penguin authors name Orwell as their favourite stablemate

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