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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

Portrait of Mo Yan

Mo Yan
1955 -

Pseudonym for Guan Moye, a Chinese author born to poor farmers in Gaomi, northeast Shandong province. His father only went...

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Portrait image of Josephine Bell

Bell, Josephine
1897 - 1987

Josephine Bell is the pseudonym of the British writer and physician Doris Bell Ball, the author of radio plays, serials, a...

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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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Författarporträtt av Mickiewicz, Adam

Mickiewicz, Adam
1798 - 1855

The Polish author Adam Mickiewicz grew up in the village of Zaosie near Novogrudok, then the Lithuanian part of the former...

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