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  • It is 75 years today since Ken Follett was born.

    British author and journalist born in Cardiff, Wales. Kenneth "Ken" Follett’s parents were active members of the church of the Plymouth Brethren, and as a child he was not allowed to watch television. Instead he read profusely; his first favourite author was Shakespeare. Follett graduated from University College London in 1970 and began to write about rock music for the Cardiff-based South Wales E...

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  • It is 87 years today since Hélène Cixous was born.

    The French philosopher, scholar and author Hélène Cixous is a leading post-structuralist feminist scholar alongside Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Cixous was born in 1937 to a Jewish family in Oran, Algeria. Her father was a Sephardic Jew from a Moroccan background, his mother was a German refugee born in Osnabrück. Cixous came from a multi-lingual family that spoke German, French, Spanish, Ar...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait of Jenny Erpenbeck

Erpenbeck, Jenny
1967 -

The German author and theatre director Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in central East Berlin where she still lives. Erpenbeck's...

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Portrait of Martin Amis

Amis, Martin
1949 - 2023

Martin Amis was the son of author Kingsley Amis and his wife Hilary. He had a younger sister, Sally, and an older brother,...

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Portrait image of Robert van Gulik

Gulik, Robert van
1910 - 1967

Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East...

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Författarporträtt av Ritsos, Yiannis

Ritsos, Yiannis
1909 - 1990

Yiannis Ritsos was born in Monemvasia on the east coast of the Peloponnese peninsula. His parents were landowners. His...

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