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  • It is 80 years today since Kjartan Fløgstad was born.

    Norwegian author born in the industrial city of Sauda. He has worked at the smelting plant in Sauda and on a Norwegian cargo ship on which he travelled all over the world, especially South America. His experiences and impressions from this continent would later become highly significant to his work. (In 2004 Fløgstad received a Chilean arts award.) He briefly studied architecture at the ...

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  • It is 72 years today since Orhan Pamuk was born.

    Turkish author, born and grew up in Istanbul, Nisantasi, in an affluent middle-class family. The father was a civil engineer, as was Orhan’s grandfather, who laid the foundations for the family’s fortune. After graduating from school – the secular American Robert College – Pamuk studied Architecture and Journalism. Until he was 22, he devoted himself to painting and dreamt of becoming an artist. T...

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  • It is 67 years today since Fred Vargas was born.

    Fred Vargas is a pseudonym used by the French historian, archaeologist and crime writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. "Vargas" was a character played by Ava Gardener in The Barefoot Contessa; the name was first used by Audoin-Rouzeau’s twin sister Joëlle, the visual artist Jo Vargas. Their father, Philippe Audoin-Rouzeau, was a journalist and a famous figure in surrealist circles. He was very part...

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  • It is 158 years today since E.W. Hornung was born.

    The English teacher and journalist Ernest William Hornung (Willie to his family) was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. If Sir Arthur was the father of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous fictional detective in the world, you could say that Hornung created the most famous crook, the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles. Like Holmes, Raffles has occasionally turned up in books by other authors.
    H...

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Sample of Authors

Författarporträtt av Pasternak, Boris

Pasternak, Boris
1890 - 1960

The Russian poet and prose writer Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow, in an art-oriented family. His mother was a concert...

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Författarporträtt av Cărtărescu, Mircea

Cărtărescu, Mircea
1956 -

The Romanian prosaist and poet Mircea Cărtărescu was born and raised in Bucharest together with his sister. Both his m...

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Portrait image of Iris Murdoch

Murdoch, Iris
1919 - 1999

The British author and philosopher Jean Iris Murdoch was of both English and Irish stock. She was born in Dublin to...

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Portrait image of Boris Akunin

Akunin, Boris
1956 -

Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of the Russian writer and translator Grigory Chkhartishvili of Georgian-Jewish origin. He was...

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