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It is 184 years today since Thomas Hardy was born.
The English author Thomas Hardy was born in Stinsford near Dorchester in Dorset, the son of a stonemason and local builder. Hardy trained as an architect before moving to London when he was twenty-two years old. He returned to Dorset where he began to write his first novel. Hardy was interested in the writings of Charles Darwin and in naturalism. During his long life he became famous for his...
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It is 111 years today since Barbara Pym was born.
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, near the Welsh border where she grew up with her younger sister Hilary. Her father was a lawyer and her mother the organist in the local church. Many of the vicars and lay clergy that visited their home later turned up in Pym's books. She was privately educated, first at a girl's school and later at boarding school. After reading...
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It is 75 years today since Ingrid Hedström was born.
TThe Swedish journalist and author Ingrid Hedström were born in Söderhamn in the central Swedish province of Hälsingland, and then moved to Avesta in nearby Dalarna when she was five years old. She is said to be one of the 1960’s so-called "welfare-state princesses", meaning that she was the first in her family to graduate from high school. She completed her final exam at Avesta Grammar School in...
Sample of Authors
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...
Further reading
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...
Further reading
Rankin, Ian
1960 -
The Scottish crime writer Ian James Rankin was born in the coal mining town of Cardenden, Fife, where his father owned a...
Further reading
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
1918 - 2008
Russian author, born in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus and raised in Rostov. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and...
Further reading