South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer’s works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile...
Robert Graves, poet, novelist, biographer, mythographer, classical scholar and translator was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a well-to-do suburb of London, and died in 1985 in Deja, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War) since 1929. Graves married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Nicholson, the daughter of the painter William Nicholson, produced four children: Jenny, David, Catherine and Sam...
David Guterson was born in Seattle in 1956. His father, Murray Guterson, is a distinguished criminal defense lawyer: "One of the things I heard [from him] early on was to find something you love to do--before you think about money or anything else. The other thing was to do something that you feel has a positive impact on the world...
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright. Her drama A Raisin in the Sun (first performed in 1959) was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and was the winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best Broadway play of the 1958-1959 season. In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun received a Broadway revival earning Tony Awards for Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald...
Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds and smells of rural America, and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts. All these things would come into play in the children’s stories Hamilton would spin as an adult...
Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Lom, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. At the age of seventeen he became an apprentice to a ropemaker, and at about the same time he began to write. He spent some years in America, travelling and working at odd jobs, and published his impressions, chiefly unfavourable, under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889) [The Intellectual Life of Modern America]...
Elizabeth Harris was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1867, to parents who had been slaves. She married Jacob Walker Harris in 1883 at the age of 15 and was the mother of nine children. She lived until 1942, surviving her husband and two of her children...
I was born on November 15, 1862. The place of my birth is Bad Obersalzbrunn, a spa famous for its medicinal springs. The house of my birth is the inn «Zur Preussischen Krone»...
Born in 1956 in Scotland, moved to Dublin 18 months later. Studied mathematical sciences in Trinity College Dublin. Beau press published 25 Poems, edited by Maurice Scully, in 1983...
