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It is 125 years today since Yasunari Kawabata was born.
Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer born in Osaka. He came from an educated, wealthy family, but he lost his parents at an early age and his only sibling, a sister, died when he was nine years old. These childhood traumas came to inform his writing. After growing up with his maternal grandfather in the countryside, Kawabata read English and Japanese literature at...
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It is 113 years today since Victor Canning was born.
Victor Canning was a British author of humorous adventure stories and thrillers. He was born in Plymouth, Devon. At the outbreak of the First World War, while his father was doing his military service, he went with his mother and siblings to live with his uncle in Calstock, a few miles north of Plymouth. This was where Canning fell in love with the English countryside, which features prominently...
Sample of Authors
Kazantzakis, Nikos
1883 - 1957
Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Megalokastro (present-day Heraklion) in Crete, which was still under Ottoman rule at the...
Further reading
Leonard, Elmore
1925 - 2013
The American author Elmore John Leonard, Jr. was born in New Orleans, but because his father worked for the automobile...
Further reading
Allende, Isabel
1942 -
Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, but she grew up in Chile. Her diplomat father left the family when Isabel was two...
Further reading
Seferis, Giorgos
1900 - 1971
The first Nobel Prize laureate to come out of Greece was born Georgios Seferiades in Urla near Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey),...
Further reading