British dramatist, born in north London, the son of a labourer, and educated at a secondary modern school. After National Service in the army and a series of dead-end jobs, he wrote The Pope's Wedding, a portrait of a frustrated, inarticulate, and finally murderous country labourer; it was given a Sunday-night performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1962. His next play, Saved, another tale of al…
American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, born in Alexandria, Louisiana, educated at Pacific Union College, California and at the University of Chicago. He moved to the Harlem district of New York at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, where he became well known as a poet. Most of his poems were published in the 1920s for periodicals such as The Crisis and were collected in Personals (…
An annual award for the best novel by a British or Commonwealth writer. Founded in 1969, the prize is sponsored by the multi-national company Booker McConnell and administered by the Book Trust. …
an international literary review, the title of which means ?dark shops?, founded in Rome in 1949 by Princess Marguerite Caetani (1880?1963), who edited it until its closure in 1960. Caetani had been editor of Commerce between 1924 and 1932 in Paris, publishing work by many of the leading writers of the day, including James Joyce, Federico Garcia Lorca, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Rainer Maria…
British poet and verse-dramatist, born in Keighley, Yorkshire, educated at Keighley Grammar School. In 1892 he was forced by illness to abandon his intended career in banking and concentrated instead on writing. The Mickle Drede (1896), the first of his collections of verse, displays the interest in Celtic and supernatural themes that is an abiding feature of his work. He produced four further vol…
American novelist, born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Bowdoin College, Maine. His first novel, The End of My Life (1947), the story of four young American volunteers in the British Army ambulance corps during the Second World War, established him as a distinctive voice amongst a younger generation of American novelists who began their literary careers in the late 1940s. Of his later novels, The …
American literary and social critic, born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Columbia Universities. Born with a severe facial disfigurement, as a child he suffered tuberculosis of the spine which retarded his growth. A leading radical intellectual of his generation, at Columbia Bourne was influenced by the historian Charles Beard, the anthropologist Franz Boas, and John Dewey. Hi…
Anglo-Irish novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, born in Dublin. An only child, she grew up in Protestant, Georgian Dublin and at the family home in County Cork, which she described in Bowen's Court (1942). At 13, after her father's breakdown and her mother's death, she was taken to Kent, but divided her adult life between Ireland and England. Her first collection of stories, Encounters, ap…
Canadian poet, fiction writer, and critic, born in the Okanagan Valley region of British Columbia, where he grew up; he was educated at the University of British Columbia. Bowering's early poetry, which includes the volumes Points on the Grid (1964), The Man in Yellow Boots (1965), Rocky Mountain Foot (1968), and The Gangs of Kosmos (1969), was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain Poets?Rober…
American writer, born in New York of a German Jewish father and a Hungarian mother. Educated privately, she travelled in Europe and moved in artistic and literary circles, meeting Celine, E. E. Cummings, Klaus Mann, and Paul Bowles whom she married in 1938. After extensive travels the couple became the centre of an expatriate literary group including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Alan Sillito…
American novelist, ?translator?, poet, and short-story writer, born in New York, educated at the University of Virginia. A composer long before he became a writer, Bowles studied under Aaron Copland and produced three operas, four ballets, and numerous other musical compositions. He turned to literature in mid-life, publishing his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, in 1949. As a writer who has stres…
British scholar and critic, born in Kiukiang, China, the son of a British customs commissioner, educated at New College, Oxford. In 1922 he became a fellow of Wadham College, where he remained in residence until his death. As warden of the college from 1938 to 1970, he was celebrated for his hospitality and unconventional good humour; John Betjeman recalls him with affection in Summoned by Bells (…
Northern Irish playwright, born in working-class East Belfast, educated at Queen's University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. Boyd refers to himself as ?an Irish playwright with a Protestant background?. The first volume of his autobiography, Out of My Class (1985), recalls a childhood filled with the mythology of sectarian rivalry and hatred. He has said that ?the sectarian divide that pois…
Australian novelist, born in Lucerne, Switzerland, educated in Melbourne. He came from a distinguished Victorian family of artists and architects. He enlisted in England with the Royal Flying Corps for service during the First World War. Spiritual restlessness and cultural enquiry inform his writings and his life; both reflect allegiance to, and interest in, traditions drawn as much from Europe as…
British novelist, born in Accra, Ghana, educated at the universities of Nice and Glasgow, and at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford (1975?80) and a television critic for the New Statesman (1981?3). On the Yankee Station (1981; revised edition 1988), a collection of stories, was followed by A Good Man in Africa (1981; Whitbread Prize), a comic novel se…
Irish novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, born in Dublin. Her first novel, Holy Pictures (1983), is a powerfully evocative, tragicomic child's-eye view of Dublin life in the 1920s. This was followed by Last Resorts (1984), a novel describing the erotic adventures of Harriet, mother of three teenage children, on a Greek holiday island; and Black Baby (1988), a comic novel about a child so…
American writer, born in Minnesota, educated at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Ohio Mechanics Institute. She moved with her first husband to France, and lived in Europe for twenty years. Much of her fiction draws on autobiographical sources; a memoir, Being Geniuses Together (1938), co-authored with Robert McAlmon, movingly chronicles her experiences in Paris and elsewhere. Boyle's d…
American novelist, born in Peekshill, New York, the grandson of Irish immigrants. He was educated at the State University of New York and the University of Iowa, where his teachers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop included J. Cheever and J. Irving. A collection of short stories, Descent of Man (1979), was followed by a novel, Water Music (1981), which is set in 1795 and interweaves scenes of London l…
a novel by Edmund White, published in 1982. This deceptively simple story, with marked autobiographical overtones, of a young boy's journey to sexual and intellectual self-awareness, reworks the conventional American bildungsroman (and its European prototype) to include an exclusively homosexual perspective and sensibility that entirely avoids shame, guilt, and self-hatred. Elegantly?and at times …
British scholar and critic, born in Wallasey, Cheshire, educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she taught throughout her career; in 1968 she became Mistress of the college, of which she produced a history entitled That Infidel Place (1969) to mark its centenary in 1969. She was best known for her contributions to Elizabethan and Shakespearian studies, which are highly regarded for her detail…
British novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, educated at the universities of Leicester, London, Indiana, and Manchester. From 1970 until 1995 he was Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959), with its university setting and cast of eccentric characters, usually academics, established the pattern which his later books were to f…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Waukegan, Illinois, educated at Los Angeles High School. Among his best-known collections of interlinked stories are The Martian Chronicles (1950; UK title The Silver Locusts, 1951) containing ?The Fire Balloons?, set on Mars, concerning missionary priests and ethereal aliens; and The Illustrated Man (1951), in which a mythical circus man's tattoos…
British critic, born in Cheltenham, the brother of F. H. Bradley; he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he lectured from 1876 to 1882, when he accepted a professorship at Liverpool University. In 1901 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry, producing his most notable work during the five years of the appointment. The essays of Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) established him as the leading S…
British philosopher, born at Clapham, the brother of A. C. Bradley; he was educated at University College, Oxford. In 1870 he was elected a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where he remained in somewhat reclusive residence until his death. With T. H. Green (1836?82), he was Oxford's leading proponent of Hegelian thought, which forms the basis for his Ethical Studies (1876) and The Principles of L…
British lexicographer, born in Manchester; following an elementary education he became a clerk in a Sheffield cutlery business, where he remained for twenty years, achieving a remarkable knowledge of numerous European and classical languages in his spare time. In 1884 he moved to London. His abilities as a philologist came to notice through his extended review in the Academy of the first part of t…
British novelist, journalist, and playwright, born in Cumbria, educated at Wadham College, Oxford. A sense of place is crucial to his fiction which is for the most part set in Cumbria and celebrates its dialect and landscape. Many of his novels describe the interaction between social expectation and the psychological and emotional development of individual men and women. They include For Want of a…
British novelist, born in Bradford, Yorkshire, educated at St Bede's Grammar School, Bradford; he was prominent among the ?Angry Young Men? of northern English fiction. Braine had worked as a librarian in the north of England. He began writing Room at the Top (1957) while recovering from TB in a sanatorium. Its realistic portrayal of life in a dour provincial town, and its story of the cynical Joe…
American poet and editor, born in Boston of West Indian parents; he attended Boston Latin School. He began his long career as literary editor with the Boston Evening Transcript in 1905. Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), his first collection of poetry, was followed by The House of Falling Leaves (1908) and Selected Poems (1948). His verse is characterized by the meditative romanticism of its themes a…
British writer, born near Manchester; he was a farmer for some years, the experience providing material for his first book, English Farming and why I Turned It Up (1894). He was also a provincial journalist, and secretary to Jerome K. Jerome before becoming a writer. His best-known works, praised by Belloc and Chesterton, are the short stories relating the activities of Kai Lung, an itinerant Chin…
Trinidadian poet and short-story writer, born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad, where she was educated at Naporima Girls' School. In 1970 she moved to Canada and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1975. With the exception of a period as a communications co-ordinator in Grenada which ended with the USA's invasion of the island in 1983, she has continued to live in Toronto, where she is widely act…
New Zealand poet, born in Dunedin, educated at Oxford University. He travelled widely in Europe, Africa, and America before finally settling in New Zealand after the Second World War. Together with fellow poet Denis Glover, Brasch was the founding editor of the major New Zealand literary journal Landfall in 1947; he continued his editorship until his retirement in 1966. Landfall Country (1962), ed…
Barbadian poet, born in Bridgetown, Barbados, educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the University of Sussex. After working as an Education Officer in Ghana, in 1962 he began teaching at the University of the West Indies, where he became Professor of Social and Cultural History in 1982. His poetry and his writings as a historian display a common concern with the cultural heritage of the Caribb…
American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, born in Tacoma, Washington. Brautigan came to prominence in the 1960s as a leading exponent of a new society. He lived in San Francisco for many years before moving to Montana at the end of the 1970s. Influenced by the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat writers, he is often remembered as one of the voices of hippy life. He wrote a wide range of …
a novel by A. Huxley, published in 1932. An anti-utopian satire, originally conceived as a parody of H. G. Wells's Men like Gods (1927), it describes a scientifically determined future where history and the family have been abolished, and Henry Ford is the deity. Reproduction takes place in bottles by ?Bokanovsky's Process?; humans are graded from Alphas to Epsilons, subjected to neo-Pavlovian con…
British writer on Spain and Spanish culture, born in Malta, educated at Radley College. Following distinguished service in the First World War, he travelled to Spain in 1919 with the intention of becoming a writer; South from Granada (1957) is his retrospective account of this period. With the exception of an interlude in London during which he wrote and published fiction under the pseudonym ?Geor…
Australian poet and critic, born in Sydney, educated at the Universities of Sydney and Berlin. The strong influence in his work of the French Symbolist poets and European literature of the nineteenth century was seen as a departure from the nationalist-radical verse prevalent in Australia at that time and may have resulted in the mixed reception of his two early collections of 1897. His major work…
British dramatist, born in Portsmouth, the son of a policeman, educated at Cambridge University. After working as a stage manager at various repertory companies, he joined Portable Theatre, one of whose founders was David Hare, with whom he was eventually to write a play about municipal corruption, Brassneck (1973), and Pravda (1986), a Jonsonian comedy about British journalism and a predatory pre…
South African poet, novelist, and painter, born in Bonnievale, Cape Province. In 1961 he settled in Paris, where he married Yolande Ngo Thi Hoong Lien, whose father was finance minister in the government of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Breytenbach's work as a visual artist and his writing, which began with books of poems in Afrikaans, are much informed by the pain of exile, and acute awareness …
a novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1945. The novel, which takes the form of an extended flashback, is narrated by Charles Ryder, an army officer billeted at the eponymous country house, owned by an aristocratic Roman Catholic family headed by Lord and Lady Marchmain. Charles had visited Brideshead with Sebastian Flyte, the Marchmains' younger son, when both were Oxford undergraduates. In the co…
a novel by Thornton Wilder, published in 1927 (Pulitzer Prize). A historical romance, set in eighteenth-century Spanish colonial Peru, it examines the lives and deaths of the five travellers who are killed when the eponymous bridge collapses. Father Juniper, a Franciscan priest, believes that the deaths are part of God's grand design, and he sets out to prove this by scientific demonstration. The …
British poet, critic, and editor, born in Walmer, Kent, educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After studying at St Bartholomew's Hospital, he became a consulting physician at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital. In 1881 he ceased medical practice in order to concentrate on his literary activities. His first collection of verse, Poems (1873), was followed by many volumes, includi…
Hart Crane's long poem setting out his ?Myth of America?, published in 1930. The lyrical realism of the poem, ?To Brooklyn Bridge?, identifies the bridge as symbol of the sequence's imaginative development. The eight succeeding sections form an impressionistic survey of the human and natural characters of America. Columbus's dramatic monologue in ?Ave Maria?, the first part, recognizes the divine …