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  • It is 77 years today since Sara Paretsky was born.

    The American author Sara Paretsky was a leading proponent – alongside Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and others – during a period in the 1980s and ‘90s when crime fiction by and about women came to the fore in the United States. She was born in Ames, Iowa, but moved with her family to Kansas in 1951 where they were harassed by the authorities on account of being Jewish. Her scientist father was a stri...

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  • It is 121 years today since Marguerite Yourcenar was born.

    French author of Belgian origin, born in Brussels. Her mother died the same year due to puerperal fever. Marguerite was raised alone by the father, the Frenchman Michel de Crayencourt, an aristocratic cosmopolitan who loved women and to play high. He was also an educated man who gave his daughter a both classical and individualistic education. Together with him, she discovered England and Italy,...

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  • It is 59 years today since Karin Alvtegen was born.

    Karin Alvtegen was born in Huskvarna in the Swedish province of Småland. Her parents were teachers. She specialised in music at upper-secondary school and later worked as props manager at Jönköping County Theatre. She claims she never dreamt of writing books, although her maternal grandfather, brother of Astrid Lindgren, was an author. Karin Alvtegen moved to Stockholm in 1985 where she co...

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  • It is 61 years today since Lutz Seiler was born.

    The German poet Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thüringen, in the GDR. When the villages where he spent his first years were razed to the ground as a result of uranium mining, the family moved back to Ger. Seiler trained as an artisan and then worked as a carpenter and mason. After military service he pursued German studies in Halle and East Berlin, graduating in 1990. As of 1997, he is head of ...

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  • It is 66 years today since James Lasdun was born.

    English author and poet, born and brought up in London, but has lived in the USA since 1986. James Lasdun gained a B.A. degree at the University of Bristol in 1979, and worked as a publisher’s reader and a literary critic for, among others, Harper's, New York Times, Granta, London Review of Books and The Guardian. In 1987, he started to teach primarily Creative Writing at various universities in t...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait of Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich
1921 - 1990

Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a German-language, Swiss author, playwright and social critic. He was born in the town of Stalden ...

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Portrait of Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco, Eugène
1909 - 1994

The playwright and author Eugène Ionesco was born in Romania to a Romanian father and a French mother. The family moved to ...

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Författarporträtt av Wolfe, Thomas

Wolfe, Thomas
1900 - 1938

The American novelist and playwright Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina. Although his parents later...

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Portrait of Janosch

Janosch
1931 -

Pseudonym for Horst Wessel Eckert. His father christened him Horst Wessel (1907–1930) after an SA-Sturmführer who was ha...

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