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  • It is 75 years today since Ken Follett was born.

    British author and journalist born in Cardiff, Wales. Kenneth "Ken" Follett’s parents were active members of the church of the Plymouth Brethren, and as a child he was not allowed to watch television. Instead he read profusely; his first favourite author was Shakespeare. Follett graduated from University College London in 1970 and began to write about rock music for the Cardiff-based South Wales E...

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  • It is 87 years today since Hélène Cixous was born.

    The French philosopher, scholar and author Hélène Cixous is a leading post-structuralist feminist scholar alongside Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Cixous was born in 1937 to a Jewish family in Oran, Algeria. Her father was a Sephardic Jew from a Moroccan background, his mother was a German refugee born in Osnabrück. Cixous came from a multi-lingual family that spoke German, French, Spanish, Ar...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait of Reiner Kunze

Kunze, Reiner
1933 -

The German poet and essayist Reiner Kunze was born in Oelsnitz (Erzegebirge), in the GDR. His father was a miner and his...

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Författarporträtt av Dumas, Alexandre, père

Dumas, Alexandre, père
1802 - 1870

French author born as Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, but known as Alexandre Dumas, père. His ancestry can be traced back to ...

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Portrait image of Assia Djebar

Djebar, Assia
1936 - 2015

Assia Djebar, born as Fatima-Zohra Imalayène, was a French-speaking Algerian author born in 1936 in Cherchell, a small ...

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Portrait of John Updike

Updike, John
1932 - 2009

American author, born in the small town of Shillington in Pennsylvania, where also his earliest works take place, but then...

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