David Jones
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
David Jones is one of the finest modernist poets. He was born in London in 1895 and was both a painter and a poet. His reputation as a poet rests largely on two works: In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. The former is a deeply moving account of Jones' experiences in the trenches in the First World War.
In Parenthesis won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1938. In his preface to the 1961 edition, T S Eliot had no hesitation in including Jones along with Joyce, Pound and himself as a premier exponent of literary modernism. The poem is a mixture of prose and verse and is accompanied by Jones' notes. What stands out is the fundamental decency and humanit
If you like author David Jones here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (28)
-
Mina Loy
Loy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England. On leaving school, she studied painting, first in Munich for two years and then in London, where one of her teachers was Augustus John. She moved to Paris, France with Stephen Haweis who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903. She first used the name Loy in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Buy books on Amazon
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Loy mixe -
Mary Borden
Mary Borden (1886–1968) was an early 20th-century, Anglo-American novelist.
Buy books on Amazon
Mary Borden was born into a wealthy Chicago family. She attended Vassar College, graduating with a B.A. in 1907. In 1908 she married George Douglas Turner, with whom she had three daughters; Joyce (born 1909), Comfort (born 1910) and Mary (born 1914). She was living in England in 1914 at the outbreak of the war and used her own money to equip and staff a field hospital close to the Front in which she herself served as a nurse from 1915 until the end of the war. It was there she met Brigadier General Edward Louis Spears, who became her second husband, in 1918, following the dissolution of her first marriage. Despite her considerable social commitments as the wife of a -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Buy books on Amazon
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
Wilfred Owen
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base.
Buy books on Amazon
Wilfred Owen was a defining voice of British poetry during the First World War, renowned for his stark portrayals of trench warfare and gas attacks. Deeply influenced by Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met while recovering from shell shock, Owen’s work departed from the patriotic war verse of the time, instead conveying the brutal reality of combat and the suffering of soldiers. Among his best-known poems are Dulce et Decorum est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, and Strange Meeting—many of which were published only after his death.
Born in 1893 in Shropshire, Owen developed an early passion for poetry and religion, both of which would shape his artistic and moral worl -
Virginia Woolf
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
Buy books on Amazon
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." -
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.
Buy books on Amazon
Her books include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published A -
Mina Loy
Loy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England. On leaving school, she studied painting, first in Munich for two years and then in London, where one of her teachers was Augustus John. She moved to Paris, France with Stephen Haweis who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903. She first used the name Loy in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Buy books on Amazon
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Loy mixe -
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. García Márquez, familiarly known as "Gabo" in his native country, was considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Buy books on Amazon
He studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespr -
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.
Buy books on Amazon
Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Mari -
Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes, commonly regarded as the father of Arthurian romance and a key figure in Western literature, composed in French in the latter part of the twelfth century. Virtually nothing is known of his life. Possibly a native of Troyes, he enjoyed patronage there from the Countess Marie of Champagne before dedicating his last romance to Count Philip of Flanders, perhaps about 1182. His poetry is marked by a learning and a taste for dialectic acquired in Latin schools; but at the same time it reveals a warm human sympathy which breathes life into characters and situations. Whilst much of his matter is inherited from the world of Celtic myth and the events notionally unfold in the timeless reign of King Arthur, the society and customs
Buy books on Amazon -
Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Buy books on Amazon
Peake also wrote poetry -
Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life in 1981. Her most notable novel, her fourth, Hotel du Lac won the Man Booker Prize in 1984. Her novel, The Next Big Thing was longlisted (alongside John Banville's, Shroud) in 2002 for the Man Booker Prize. She published more than 25 works of fiction, notably: Strangers (2009) shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Fraud (1992) and, The Rules of Engagement (2003). She was also the first female to hold a Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Cambridge University.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.
Buy books on Amazon
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the -
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.
Buy books on Amazon
She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced h -
Elizabeth Bishop
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. -
Ann Quin
Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37.
Buy books on Amazon
Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels.
Despite a complete re-print of her works by the Dalkey Archive Press, Quin's work has yet to see the critical attention many people claim it deserves. -
Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is an Anglican bishop, poet, and theologian. He was Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002-2012, and is now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Chancellor of the University of South Wales.
Buy books on Amazon -
László Krasznahorkai
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025.
Buy books on Amazon
He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies.
Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre. -
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE was born into a wealthy banking family, the middle of 3 brothers. His Anglican mother and Jewish father separated when he was five. He had little subsequent contact with ‘Pappy’, who died of TB 4 years later. He presented his mother with his first ‘volume’ at 11. Sassoon spent his youth hunting, cricketing, reading, and writing. He was home-schooled until the age of 14 because of ill health. At school he was academically mediocre and teased for being un-athletic, unusually old, and Jewish. He attended Clare College, Cambridge, but left without taking his degree. In 1911, Sassoon read ‘The Intermediate Sex’ by Edward Carpenter, a book about homosexuality which was a revelation for Sassoon. In 1913 he wrote ‘The
Buy books on Amazon -
Byron Rogers
Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. In August, 2007 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography published in the previous year, for The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of RS Thomas. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny."
Buy books on Amazon
Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore -
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
Buy books on Amazon
Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaign -
Antonio di Benedetto
Antonio di Benedetto was an Argentine journalist and writer.
Buy books on Amazon
Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor.
Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). Los suicidas (The Suicides, 1969) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato.
In mid-sixties or early seventies he caused a diplomatic fau -
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, soldier, historical novelist and critic. Born in Wimbledon, he received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
Buy books on Amazon
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet -
-
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
Buy books on Amazon -
Andrea Long Chu
Andrea Long Chu is a writer, critic, academic living in Brooklyn. Her first book, published by Verso, is Females. As an essayist, her work has appeared in n+1, Boston Review, The New York Times, New York, New York Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Jewish Currents, Chronicle of Higher Education, Affidavit, 4Columns, differences, Women and Performance, TSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She is currently a doctoral student at New York University.
Buy books on Amazon -
Byron Rogers
Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. In August, 2007 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography published in the previous year, for The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of RS Thomas. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny."
Buy books on Amazon
Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore -
Basil Bunting
Born into a Quaker family, Bunting was educated at the Royal Grammar School there for two years. He then studied at two Quaker schools: from 1912–1916 at Ackworth School in Yorkshire and from 1916–1918 at Leighton Park School in Berkshire. His Quaker education strongly influenced his pacifist opposition to World War I, and in 1918 he was arrested as a conscientious objector, serving a sentence of more than a year in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester prisons. These events were to have an important role in his first major poem, Villon (1925). Villon was one of a rather rare set of complexly structured poems that Bunting labelled "sonatas," thus underlining the sonic qualities of his verse and recalling his love of music. After his release from p
Buy books on Amazon