-
It is 205 years today since Walt Whitman was born.
Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, a village on Long Island, New York, as the second child of nine to Walter, a house builder, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, both of whom had an interest in Quaker religion and Socialism. The Whitman family moved to Brooklyn when Walt was four where the children were brought up in somewhat insecure circumstances due to bad investments.
Whitman had little... -
It is 137 years today since Saint-John Perse was born.
The French poet Saint-John Perse was born Marie-René Alexis Saint-Léger, the only son of five children born to a wealthy family in Pointe-à-Pitre on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean where his parents owned two plantations. His father was a solicitor as was his grandfather. When the economic situation on the islands deteriorated and a new mayor, hostile to the colonial power, was el...
-
It is 76 years today since Svetlana Alexievich was born.
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine three years after the Second World War. She grew up in a village in Belorussia where her Ukrainian father and Belorussian mother were teachers. She studied journalism in Minsk and later worked as a journalist and editor in Belorussia. She embarked on her magnum opus, Voices of Utopia – History of the Red Man, in the early 1980s. In 2000 she was forced to g...
-
It is 56 years today since John Connolly was born.
Irish author, born and raised in Dublin. After finishing school, he worked for a few years, including jobs as a bartender and waiter, before starting to study at Trinity College in his home city. After graduating with a B.A. in English, he went on to study Journalism at Dublin City University, gaining an M.A. in 1993. He did freelance work for The Irish Times but got tired of that and decided to...
Sample of Authors
Eriksson, Kjell
1953 -
The Swedish author and gardener Kjell Eriksson was born in Uppsala, Sweden and grew up in a working-class family on...
Further reading
Neruda, Pablo
1904 - 1973
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was born as Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basualto in the town of Parral some four hundred kilometres ...
Further reading
Bernhard, Thomas
1931 - 1989
Thomas Bernhard was born near Maastricht in the Netherlands and grew up in Henndorf, Austria. He never knew his father, who...
Further reading
Dowlatabadi, Mahmoud
1940 -
The Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi was born in the village of Dowlatabad in Khorasan Province near the border with...
Further reading