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Thomas Tusser was a 16th century English poet, perhaps one of the earliest known of the pastoral English poets. A farmer first, he turned to poetry and, in 1557, he produced a long piece of work called Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. Although set to verse he wrote it as an instructional aide to other farmers and it became his best known ...
Samuel Lover was born in Dublin at the end of the 18th century and his artistic talents made him one of Ireland’s best known and best loved songwriters. He also wrote novels and was an able poet. Added to all this he was a talented portrait painter and made a speciality of painting miniatures which were very popular at that time. ...
Born in 1869, in Swanmore, Hampshire, writer and teacher Stephen Leacock moved to Canada at an early age and became one of the best known humorists of his time. His family had made their money from running plantations in Madeira and there was a strong history associated with the British Empire. When Leacock was just 6 years old, his father decided to ...
Poet and writer Thomas Pringle was born in Roxburghshire in Scotland in 1789 and counted amongst his friends Sir Walter Scott. He is perhaps most strongly linked to South African poetry after spending some years in the country and was one of the first English writers to describe the region and the people who lived there. Pringle’s father was a farmer ...
Born in Texas in 1935, Tomas Rivera was a Mexican-American author and poet who was brought up as a migrant farm hand, spending much of his youth toiling in the fields of the Mid-West with his family. He managed to gain a good education despite the fact that his mother and father moved from place to place to secure work. As a ...
Born in 1874 in Geneva, Trumbull Stickney led a short but productive life and could well have been one of the great poets of the 20th Century had he not died shortly after his thirtieth birthday. It is certain that he had not realized the full extent of his literary powers and his finished work is now often characterized as a ...
Born in 1875 in the Ukraine, Shaul Tchernichovsky is considered one of the great Hebrew poets of the modern era. Brought up in the small village of Mykhailivka he went to a Jewish school for the first few years of his education before transferring to a Russian establishment in Odessa where he began to write poetry seriously. Tchernichovsky wrote his first poem, ...
The Japanese poet Shinkichi Takahashi has been described as the only 20th century Zen poet in Japanese literature and one of Japan’s all-time great poets. A pioneer in his own country of the European avant-garde art movement of Dadaism, he won the Ministry of Education Prize for Art for his Collected Poems in 1977. He was born in 1901 in a small fishing village ...
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, KStJ, DL is best known all over the world as the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, a series of books which owed much to his medical background. The precise, forensic mind of Holmes was inspired by Doyle’s mentor during his medical training at Edinburgh, a man named Dr Joseph Bell. Indeed, when his good friend ...
Thomas Blackburn was a 20th century English poet whose published work also included musical dramas, novels and studies of other modern poets. He had a troubled childhood and his state of mind did not seem to improve much as he went through his adult years which included three marriages. His second marriage, to artist Rosalie de Meric, produced a daughter (Julia ...
