Anniversaries, 31 March
John Fowles
John Robert Fowles was born in a middle-class family in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea. His father, Robert Fowles, dreamt of a career in the legal profession, but when the First World War broke out he was instead forced to take over the family's tobacco business. His mother, Gladys May, was a housewife. Fowles grew up in the security of a terraced housing estate, but later in life he confessed that it depressed him. As an only child, he often felt lonely. His only sibling, his sister Hazel,...
Anniversaries, 31 March
Maria Lang
Maria Lang is the pen name of the teacher and head mistress Dagmar (Maria) Lange, one of Sweden’s most popular, but also most criticised, crime novelists. Lange and Stieg Trenter dominated the Swedish crime fiction scene in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the media they were referred to as King Stieg and Queen Maria. Dagmar Lange was born in Västerås. The family moved to Lindesberg in 1915 where her father, Claes Lange, had found employment as a newspaper editor. He died two years later, only 27 years ol...
Anniversaries, 31 March
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz is regarded as one of the foremost authors of the 20th century. He was born in Mixcoac near Mexico City the same year as the two leaders of the radical peasant movement, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, entered the capital. Paz's father, a lawyer, supported the revolutionary leader Zapata. Although his family was less affluent during the revolution than they had once been, Paz was brought up in comfortable circumstances in an educated family. He had access to the ten thousand...
Anniversaries, 31 March
Enrique Vila-Matas
Spanish author of essays, short stories and novels born in Barcelona, Catalonia. He studied law and journalism at university. At the end of the 1960s he contributed to the film magazine Fotograms and to Destino, from 1937 to 1980 the organ for intellectual Catalans who supported an independent Catalonia, who were exiled to the Basque Country from 1936 to 1939 and who were regularly censored during the Franco regime. In recent years, Vila-Mata has appeared in the French Le magazine littéraire ...
Photo: Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto via Getty Images (2008)
Sample of authors
Vargas, Fred
Fred Vargas is a pseudonym used by the French historian, archaeologist and crime writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. "Vargas" was a character played by Ava Gardener in The Barefoot Contessa; the name was first used by Audoin-Rouzeau’s twin sister Joëlle, the visual artist Jo Vargas. Their father, Philippe Audoin-Rouzeau, was a journalist and a famous figure in surrealist circles. He was very part...