Meny
  • It is 131 years today since Dorothy L. Sayers was born.

    English writer and translator, born in Oxford as the only child of Henry Sayers, rector of Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, and his wife Helen Leigh Sayers. When Dorothy L. (Leigh) Sayers was four years old, the family moved to Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire where the father was appointed pastor. The parents had cultural and linguistic interests, and regularly travelled with their daughter to...

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  • It is 159 years today since William Butler Yeats was born.

    William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, but he spent most of his life in England and France. His father was a successful portrait painter, and the young Yeats intended to follow in his footsteps. He attended the School of Art in Dublin, but after three years he abandoned art for literature.
    He published his first poetry collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait image of Denise Mina

Mina, Denise
1966 -

Denise Mina is a Scottish lawyer and author of crime novels. She was born in East Kilbride, Glasgow. Her father was an oil...

Further reading
Portrait image of Dominique Manotti

Manotti, Dominique
1942 -

Behind the name Dominique Manotti hides the professor of Economic History Marie-Noëlle Thibault. It was when she, in her ...

Further reading
Portrait image of John Berger

Berger, John
1926 - 2017

The English author and artist John Berger was born in a middle-class home in Stoke Newington, London. His father, S.J.D....

Further reading
Portrait image of Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta
1925 - 2006

Pramoedya Ananta Toer is Indonesia's best-known author outside Indonesia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and he...

Further reading