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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 Chesterton, G.K.

Chesterton, G.K.
1874 - 1936

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a British author and critic born in Kensington, London, as the oldest son of a retired estate...

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Portrait of Martin Amis

Amis, Martin
1949 - 2023

Martin Amis was the son of author Kingsley Amis and his wife Hilary. He had a younger sister, Sally, and an older brother,...

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Författarporträtt av Heine, Heinrich

Heine, Heinrich
1797 - 1856

German poet and publicist born as Harry Heine in Düsseldorf, Prussia. His father was a Jewish textile merchant from a ...

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Portrait of Heinrich Böll

Böll, Heinrich
1917 - 1985

German author born in Cologne. Böll was brought up a Roman Catholic in a middle-class family with pacifist and anti-Nazi ...

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