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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

Portrait of Elias Canetti

Canetti, Elias
1905 - 1994

The prose writer and playwright Elias Canetti was born in the city of Rustchuk (or Ruse) in Bulgaria. His father, who was a...

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Författarporträtt av Burnett, W.R.

Burnett, W.R.
1899 - 1982

The American novelist and screenwriter William Riley Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, in an influential family. He...

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Portrait image of Agatha Christie

Christie, Agatha
1890 - 1976

English detective writer, born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in an affluent middle-class home in Torquay in Devon County....

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Författarporträtt av Adonis

Adonis
1930 -

Adonis, or Adunis, is the alias of the Syrian-Lebanese poet Ali Ahmad Said. Said was born in a poor farming community in...

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