François Villon
François Villon (in modern French, pronounced [fʁɑ̃swa vijɔ̃]; in fifteenth-century French, [frɑnswɛ viˈlɔn]) (c. 1431 – after 5 January 1463) was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison. The question "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?", taken from the "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" and translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as "Where are the snows of yesteryear?", is one of the most famous lines of translated secular poetry in the English-speaking world.
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Béroul
Béroul was a Norman poet of the twelfth century. Béroul is, by agreement, the name given to the author of a version of the legend of Tristan and Isolde, written in a Norman dialect.
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Béroul était un poète normand du xiie siècle. C'est le nom que l'on donne par convention à l'auteur d'une version en vers de la légende de Tristan et Iseut, écrite dans un dialecte normand. -
Shota Rustaveli
Shota Rustaveli (Georgian: შოთა რუსთაველი) (born approx. c. 1160 – died after c. 1220), was a Georgian poet of the 12th century, and one of the greatest contributors to Georgian literature. He is author of "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" (ვეფხისტყაოსანი, Vepkhistkaosani), the Georgian national epic poem.
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Little, if anything, is known about Rustaveli from contemporary sources. His poem itself, namely the prologue, provides a clue to his identity: the poet identifies himself as "a certain Rustveli." "Rustveli" is not a surname, but a territorial epithet which can be interpreted as "of/from/holder of Rustavi." Later Georgian authors of the 15th–18th centuries are more informative: they are almost unanimous in identifying him as Shota Rustave -
Guadalupe Nettel
Guadalupe Nettel (born 1973) is a Mexican writer. She was born in Mexico City and obtained a PhD in linguistics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has published in several genres, both fiction and non-fiction.
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Nettel is a prolific author and a regular contributor to both Spanish- and French-language magazines, including Letras Libres, Hoja por hoja, L'atelier du roman, and L'inconvénient. In 2006 she was voted one of thirty-nine most important Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine at the Bogotá Hay Festival.
She has lived in Montreal and Paris, and is now based in Barcelona, where she works as a translator and holds writing seminars and a workshop on Potential Literature (based on the French Oul -
Truman Capote
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Truman Capote was an American writer whose non-fiction, stories, novels and plays are recognised literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a "non-fiction novel." At least 20 films and TV dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.
He was born as Truman Streckfus Persons to a salesman Archulus Persons and young Lillie Mae. His parents divorced when he was four and he went to live with his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He was a lonely child who learned to read and write by himself before entering school. In 1933, he moved to New York City to live wi -
Sjón
Sjón (Sigurjón B. Sigurðsson) was born in Reykjavik on the 27th of August, 1962. He started his writing career early, publishing his first book of poetry, Sýnir (Visions), in 1978. Sjón was a founding member of the surrealist group, Medúsa, and soon became significant in Reykjavik's cultural landscape.
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Since then, his prolific writing drove him to pen song lyrics, scripts for movies and of course novels such as The Blue Fox. -
Paul Auster
Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Le
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust , published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.
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George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther .
With this key figure of German literature, th -
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.
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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 -
Roberto Bolaño
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain. Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain, where he married and settled on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona, working as a dishwasher, a campground custodian, bellhop and garbage collector — working during the day and writing at night.
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He continued with his poetry, before shifting to fiction in his early forties. In an interview Bolaño stated that he made this decision because he felt responsible for the future financial well-being of his family, which he knew he could never secure from the earnings of a poet. This was confirmed by Jorge Herralde, who explained that Bolaño "aband -
Jon Fosse
Jon Olav Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway and currently lives in Bergen. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black). His first play, Og aldri skal vi skiljast, was performed and published in 1994. Jon Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, essays and plays. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. He is widely considered as one of the world's greatest contemporary playwrights. Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007. Fosse also has been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph.
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He was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayabl -
Varlam Shalamov
Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov (Russian: Варлам Тихонович Шаламов; June 18, 1907–January 17, 1982), baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist and poet.
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Alternate spellings of his name:
Варлам Шаламов
Varlam Chalamov
Warłam Szałamow
Warlam Schalamow
V. T. Shalamov
Varlam Șalamov -
Ingeborg Bachmann
“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated soc
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Federico García Lorca
Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.
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Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes is a French writer, novelist and filmmaker, born in Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle. Her most famous novel, and film of the same name is Baise-moi, a contemporary example of the exploitation films genre known as rape and revenge films. Her most recent biographical, non-fiction work, King Kong Theory has also been translated into English, and recounts her experiences working within the French sex industry, and attendant infamy and praise associated with the aforementioned Baise-Moi.
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Thomas Mann
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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See also:
Serbian: Tomas Man
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important -
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.
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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 -
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who ranks among the most distinguished German-speaking writers of the second half of the 20th century.
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Although internationally he’s most acclaimed because of his novels, he was also a prolific playwright. His characters are often at work on a lifetime and never-ending major project while they deal with themes such as suicide, madness and obsession, and, as Bernhard did, a love-hate relationship with Austria. His prose is tumultuous but sober at the same time, philosophic by turns, with a musical cadence and plenty of black humor.
He started publishing in the year 1963 with the novel Frost. His last published work, appearing in the year 1986, was Extinction. Some of his best-known works include The Loser -
Max Frisch
Max Rudolph Frisch was born in 1911 in Zurich; the son of Franz Bruno Frisch (an architect) and Karolina Bettina Frisch (née Wildermuth). After studying at the Realgymnasium in Zurich, he enrolled at the University of Zurich in 1930 and began studying German literature, but had to abandon due to financial problems after the death of his father in 1932. Instead, he started working as a journalist and columnist for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), one of the major newspapers in Switzerland. With the NZZ he would entertain a lifelong ambivalent love-hate relationship, for his own views were in stark contrast to the conservative views promulgated by this newspaper. In 1933 he travelled through eastern and south-eastern Europe, and in 1935 he vis
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Franz Kafka
Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as " The Metamorphosis " (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.
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Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.
His stories include "The Metamorphosis" (1912) and " In the Penal Colony " (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).
Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of -
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
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Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genèv -
Guillaume de Lorris
Guillaume de Lorris (fl. 1230) was a French scholar and poet, and was the author of the first section of the Romance of the Rose. Little is known about him, other than that he wrote the earlier section of the poem around 1230, and that the work was completed forty years later by Jean de Meun.
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From Wikipedia -
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
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Nikos Kazantzakis
(Greek: Νίκος Καζαντζάκης)
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Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years, and remains the most translated Greek author worldwide. -
Leo Vardiashvili
Aspiring novelist and the author of HARD BY A GREAT FOREST - out in the US and UK in 30 January 2024.
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Represented by Sara O'Keeffe at Aevitas Creative Management UK. -
Μαρία Ιορδανίδου
Maria Iordanidou
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Γεννήθηκε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη το 1897 και έζησε τα παιδικά της χρόνια στον Πειραιά και το Βατούμ της Ρωσίας. Φοίτησε σε ρωσικό γυμνάσιο, στη Σταυρούπολη, όπου τη βρήκε η Οκτωβριανή Επανάσταση. Το 1919 γύρισε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη και λίγο αργότερα πήγε στην Αλεξάνδρεια, όπου παντρεύτηκε τον Ιορδάνη Ιορδανίδη. Το 1923 επέστρεψαν μαζί στην Αθήνα, αλλά σύντομα ο Ιορδανίδης έφυγε.
Εξαιτίας των συνθηκών της ζωής της, η Ιορδανίδου απέκτησε μεγάλη γλωσσομάθεια και εργάστηκε ως ιδιωτική υπάλληλος. Έγινε γνωστή στο λογοτεχνικό χώρο με το έργο Λωξάντρα, που έγραψε σε ηλικία 65 χρονών, το 1962, και γνώρισε πολλές επανεκδόσεις. Η Λωξάντρα περιγράφει με μεγάλη ζωντάνια και χιούμορ τα έθιμα και τη ζωή των Ελλήνων της Πόλης και βασίζεται -
Megan Nolan
Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland and is currently based in London. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, White Review, Guardian and Frieze amongst others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021 and was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
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Her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, will be published by Jonathan Cape in July 2023. -
Nikoloz Baratashvili
Nikoloz "Tato" Baratashvili was a Georgian poet. He was one of the first Georgians to marry a modern nationalism with European Romanticism and to introduce "Europeanism" into Georgian literature. Despite his early death and a tiny literary heritage of fewer than forty short lyrics, one extended poem, and a few private letters, Baratashvili is considered to be the high point of Georgian Romanticism. He was referred as the "Georgian Byron".
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Nikoloz Baratashvili, affectionately known as Tato, was born in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia's capital, which was then a principal city of Russian Transcaucasia. His father, Prince Meliton Baratashvili (1795–1860), was an impoverished nobleman working for the Russian administration. His mother, Ephemia Orbeli -
Sadegh Hedayat
Iranian author who introduced modernist techniques into Persian fiction. He is considered one of the greatest Iranian writers of the 20th century.
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هدایت از پیشگامان داستاننویسی نوین ایران و از روشنفکران برجسته ایرانی بود. برترین اثر وی رمان بوف کور است که آن را جزو مشهورترین آثار ادبیات داستانی معاصر ایران دانستهاند. حجم آثار و مقالات نوشته شده درباره نوشتهها، نوع زندگی و خودکشی صادق هدایت بیانگر تأثیر ژرف او بر جریان روشنفکری ایران است. هرچند شهرت عام هدایت نویسندگی است، آثاری از نویسندگان بزرگ را نیز ترجمه کردهاست. صادق هدایت در ۱۹ فروردین سال ۱۳۳۰ در پاریس خودکشی کرد. آرامگاه وی در گورستان پرلاشز پاریس واقع است -
David Kldiashvili
David Kldiashvili (Georgian: დავით კლდიაშვილი, Davit' Kldiašvili) (August 29, 1862 – April 24, 1931) was a Georgian prose-writer whose novels and plays are concentrated on the degeneration of the country’s gentry and the miseries of the peasantry, boldly exposing the antagonisms of Georgian society.
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Born to an impoverished petite noble family in the province of Imereti, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), he was educated at the military schools of Kiev and Moscow (1880-1882). Returning to Georgia, he joined the Russian army. While serving in Batumi, he was close to the local intelligentsia and engaged in cultural activities. Deemed to be a non-reliable officer, he was forced to resign as a non-reliable officer during the Russian Revol -
Fernanda Melchor
Nací en el puerto de Veracruz. Escribí el libro de crónicas Aquí no es Miami y las novelas Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Páradais.
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I was born in Veracruz, Mexico. I wrote the non-fiction book Aquí no es Miami and the novels Falsa liebre, Temporada de huracanes y Paradais. -
Iakob Tsurtaveli
Jacob of Tsurtavi (Georgian: იაკობ ცურტაველი, Iakob Tsurtaveli) also known as Jacob the Priest (იაკობ ხუცესი, Iakob Khutsesi) was the 5th-century Georgian religious writer and priest from Tsurtavi, then the major town of Gogarene and the Lower Iberia.
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A personal priest of Saint Shushanik and an eyewitness of her martyrdom at the hand of her spouse, bidaxae Varsken, Jacob compiled her life in his hagiographic novel the Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik, the oldest surviving work of the Georgian literature written between 476 and 483. Except for scarce information obtained from his work, nothing more is known about Jacob’s life. -
Μαρία Ιορδανίδου
Maria Iordanidou
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Γεννήθηκε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη το 1897 και έζησε τα παιδικά της χρόνια στον Πειραιά και το Βατούμ της Ρωσίας. Φοίτησε σε ρωσικό γυμνάσιο, στη Σταυρούπολη, όπου τη βρήκε η Οκτωβριανή Επανάσταση. Το 1919 γύρισε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη και λίγο αργότερα πήγε στην Αλεξάνδρεια, όπου παντρεύτηκε τον Ιορδάνη Ιορδανίδη. Το 1923 επέστρεψαν μαζί στην Αθήνα, αλλά σύντομα ο Ιορδανίδης έφυγε.
Εξαιτίας των συνθηκών της ζωής της, η Ιορδανίδου απέκτησε μεγάλη γλωσσομάθεια και εργάστηκε ως ιδιωτική υπάλληλος. Έγινε γνωστή στο λογοτεχνικό χώρο με το έργο Λωξάντρα, που έγραψε σε ηλικία 65 χρονών, το 1962, και γνώρισε πολλές επανεκδόσεις. Η Λωξάντρα περιγράφει με μεγάλη ζωντάνια και χιούμορ τα έθιμα και τη ζωή των Ελλήνων της Πόλης και βασίζεται -
Ilia Chavchavadze
Ilia Chavchavadze (Georgian: ილია ჭავჭავაძე; 8 November 1837 – 12 September 1907) was a Georgian writer, poet, journalist, lawyer, politicial and public figure who spearheaded the revival of the Georgian national movement in the second half of the 19th century, during the Russian rule of Georgia. Today he is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Georgia. In 1987 he was canonized as Saint Ilia the Righteous (წმინდა ილია მართალი) by the Georgian Orthodox Church. Today, Georgians revere Chavchavadze as Pater Patriae (Father of the Fatherland) of Georgia.
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Inspired by the contemporary liberal movements in Europe, as a writer and a public figure, Ilia Chavchavadze directed much of his efforts toward awakening national ideals in