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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

Författarporträtt av Lagerkvist, Pär

Lagerkvist, Pär
1891 - 1974

Swedish author, born in Växjö as the youngest of seven siblings. His father was a railway station supervisor, and Pär La...

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Författarporträtt av Södergran, Edith

Södergran, Edith
1892 - 1923

The Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran was born in St. Petersburg, but her family soon moved to the village of Raivola on ...

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Portrait of Elias Canetti

Canetti, Elias
1905 - 1994

The prose writer and playwright Elias Canetti was born in the city of Rustchuk (or Ruse) in Bulgaria. His father, who was a...

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Författarporträtt av Gide, André

Gide, André
1869 - 1951

The French novelist, poet and playwright was born into a wealthy, strictly protestant bourgeois Paris family. His father, a...

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