Meny
  • 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 Elfriede Jelinek

Jelinek, Elfriede
1946 -

The Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag in the federal state of Steiermark, where Jelinek spent her ...

Further reading
Portrait image of Pepetela

Pepetela
1941 -

His full name is Artur Carlos Mauricio Pestana dos Santos, an Angolan author, born in the coastal town of Benguela. He took...

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Portrait of Alistair MacLean

MacLean, Alistair
1922 - 1987

The Scottish author Alistair Stuart MacLean was born in Shettleston, Glasgow, in a Gaelic-speaking family as Alasdair...

Further reading
Författarporträtt av Ashbery, John

Ashbery, John
1927 - 2017

The poet, art critic, translator and essayist John Lawrence Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm...

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