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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 Malmsten, Bodil

Malmsten, Bodil
1944 - 2016

Bodil Malmsten was born in the small village of Bjärme in Jämtland. As a teenager, she moved to Stockholm, where she would l...

Further reading
Portrait image of Ian McEwan

McEwan, Ian
1948 -

Ian Russel McEwan is an English author and screenwriter born in Aldershot, Hampshire. His father was a major, and Ian...

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Författarporträtt av Despentes, Virginie

Despentes, Virginie
1969 -

The French author Virginie Despentes was born in Nancy, northeast France. She was convinced from an early age that girls...

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Författarporträtt av Matthews, John

Matthews, John
1952 -

John Matthews is a British journalist and author. After having published two unremarkable novels in the 1980s he had an...

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