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It is 125 years today since Yasunari Kawabata was born.
Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer born in Osaka. He came from an educated, wealthy family, but he lost his parents at an early age and his only sibling, a sister, died when he was nine years old. These childhood traumas came to inform his writing. After growing up with his maternal grandfather in the countryside, Kawabata read English and Japanese literature at...
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It is 113 years today since Victor Canning was born.
Victor Canning was a British author of humorous adventure stories and thrillers. He was born in Plymouth, Devon. At the outbreak of the First World War, while his father was doing his military service, he went with his mother and siblings to live with his uncle in Calstock, a few miles north of Plymouth. This was where Canning fell in love with the English countryside, which features prominently...
Sample of Authors
Balzac, Honoré de
1799 - 1850
Honoré de Balzac was born Honoré Balzac in Tours, France, to a civil servant and his wife who was 30 years his junior. He a...
Further reading
Grafton, Sue
1940 - 2017
Sue Taylor Grafton was an American author of detective novels born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her father, Cornelius Warren...
Further reading
Rifbjerg, Klaus
1931 - 2015
Danish author born to a middle-class family in Copenhagen. Both parents were teachers who read newspapers across the...
Further reading
McClure, James
1939 - 2006
The journalist and author James "Jim" McClure’s Scottish parents left for South Africa in 1930, and he was subsequently b...
Further reading