It’s the birthday of one of the great Victorian novelists, George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Cross Evans, 1819-1880), known for brilliant novels such as Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1871-72), but whose birthday this year falls on Thanksgiving and therefore will not receive the attention that is her due. But for goodness’ sake, if you [...]
It’s the birthday of British-born ethnically-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer (b. 1959), whose debut novel, Under the Frog (1992), made a Big Huge Literary Splash and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, after the novel had been rejected by 56 publishers who are even now probably still kicking themselves. (Let’s all pause to enjoy imagining that.) [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir William Golding (1911-1993), author of Lord of the Flies (1954), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1983), and lifelong proponent that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Golding was born in the village of St. Columb Minor near the coastal town of Newquay in Cornwall, England. He [...]
It’s the birthday of English author and art historian Anita Brookner (1928-2016), first known as a brilliant art critic and later more widely known for her bleak but witty novels about unhappy middle-aged women, one of which, Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize out from under the heavily favored Empire of the Sun [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian author Alice Munro (b. 1931), who earned her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as “a consummate artist who is without question among the most accomplished masters of the short story” (Robert Thacker, “Alice Munro,” from The Nobel Prizes 2013). Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, to a [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian author Yann Martel (b. 1963), best known for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001), in which an Indian boy loses his entire family in a shipwreck and ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker. Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, where his Canadian [...]