Anniversaries, 13 March
Jack Kerouac
The American author Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parents were French-Canadian, and Kerouac did not learn to speak English until he was six. He had a Catholic upbringing, and in 1940 he enrolled at Columbia University, New York. He later dropped out and went to sea. He continued to travel around the United States and the world, often with friends that included Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.
Jack Kerouac started to write little...
Anniversaries, 13 March
Giorgos Seferis
The first Nobel Prize laureate to come out of Greece was born Georgios Seferiades in Urla near Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey), then part of the Ottoman Empire, a city that has also been associated with the birth of Homer. Seferis’ father was a lawyer and university professor; his mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner.
In 1914, the family moved to Athens where Seferis continued his secondary education. He then went on to read law at the Sorbonne between 1918 and 1925. In 1922, the Turkish A...
Anniversaries, 13 March
Mahmoud Darwish
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birweh in Western Gallilee to a landowning family. His parents were forced to flee on foot when Israeli troops invaded the village in June 1948. Like hundreds of other Palestinian villages, al-Birweh was razed to the ground in order to prevent families moving back to the land that was later occupied by Israel. The Darwish family settled in Deir al-Asad in 1949 and later moved to Haifa where Mahmoud grew up. His first poems were...
Sample of authors
Smith, Ernest
Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith, was an English author, numismatist and creator of two of the most original characters in British fiction: the Chinese master storyteller Kai Lung and the blind detective Max Carrados. The stories are still read and appreciated, mostly in the UK. Smith was a recluse who refused to give interviews even though he became something of a celebrity in Britain....