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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
Djebar, Assia
1936 - 2015
Assia Djebar, born as Fatima-Zohra Imalayène, was a French-speaking Algerian author born in 1936 in Cherchell, a small ...
Further reading
Alexievich, Svetlana
1948 -
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine three years after the Second World War. She grew up in a village in Belorussia...
Further reading
Beauvoir, Simone de
1908 - 1986
The French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was born and grew up as the oldest daughter of a noble Catholic family...
Further reading
Mulisch, Harry
1927 - 2010
The Dutch author Harry Mulisch was born in the city of Haarlem. His father came from Austria, an officer who had fled to...
Further reading