A major celebration of George Orwell kicks off today with the inaugural "Orwell Day", to be followed by a month-long Orwell season on Radio 4 and a mass giveaway of one of his most famous essays, Politics and the English Language.

The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm died on 21 January 1950, and 2013 also marks the 110th anniversary of his birth on 25 June 1903. The Orwell Estate, The Orwell Prize and the author's publisher Penguin has decided to launch an annual event, "Orwell Day", on 21 January in "recognition of one of Britain's greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century", and to "celebrate his writing in all its forms and explore the profound influence he has had on the media and discourse of the modern world", it said.

Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language is being given away for free from the Orwell prize's website, as well as published in a 99p edition by Penguin. "We're aiming to get everyone reading it – in schools, everywhere. It's just one essay, and it's such a radical essay, with the message that language is corrupt, but you can do something about it," said Jean Seaton, chair of the Orwell prize judges, professor of media history at the University of Westminster and the official historian of the BBC.

"Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from conservatives to anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote Orwell in the essay, and Seaton said "we are now in a battle for the kind of nation we will live in just as much as he was".

Today also marks the launch of new-look editions of four Orwell books, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four, from Penguin Classics, with the latter sporting a new jacket with the book's title almost entirely blacked out, in recognition of the novel's topic of censorship.

On 26 January, BBC Radio 4 begins a major Orwell season, including adaptions of Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and Nineteen Eighty-Four, a reading of Down and Out in Paris and London as the station's "Book at Bedtime", and glimpses of Orwell's own life through looks at his time as a young policeman in Burma, his relationships and his last days on Jura writing Animal Farm. "Of course there is no real George Orwell – it was the pen name of Eric Blair – but he was a writer and political commentator who is very hard to pin down," said the BBC. "Through dramatisations of the key books, through four newly commissioned plays that explore the disjuncture between the man who was Eric Blair and the writer who was George Orwell, and through factual programming and readings, Radio 4 will take the listener on a journey from Burma via Catalonia, Wigan, Jura and Manor Farm along the road that led eventually to Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most influential novels of the 20th century."

The Orwell prize is also taking part in the first ever international literary festival in Burma, in honour of the author, taking out thousands of pounds' worth of Orwell books to give away. Attending authors at the Irrawaddy literary festival include Timothy Garton Ash, William Dalrymple, Jung Chang, and the festival's patron Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

"Orwell is in the air," said Seaton. "I think he is very relevant today. He puts truth before self. Very few of us can bear to do that. It's a vocation. But nonetheless, we need people to do that, and he reminds us of that. It's that bleak realism, expressed beautifully – it is what will keep us decent … Both his writing and in an odd kind of way his personal life stand for integrity. If there was one value that politicians, bankers and journalists, and in a curious way our society as a whole, needs, it's no jargon, and more integrity."