Barry Pain was an English writer whose work included parodies, light humour and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, tales of horror and the supernatural. He “re-imagined” stories such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Robinson Crusoe, taking the characters further on. Stevenson studied Pain’s work and compared him to the French short story writer Guy ...
Barcroft Boake was a tough 19th century Australian stockman and drover while at the same time he was a sensitive, if unstable, character. He wrote poetry about the injustices meted out to his fellow workers by usually uncaring, and often absent, land and stock owners. He seemed to be at home out in the bush and it was said that he looked ...
Barron Field was an English poet, judge and botanist who spent much of his working life in the Australian colonies of New South Wales as well as holding legal appointments in Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and Gibraltar. He was something of a minor poet but he does have the distinction of being the first published poet in Australia. First Fruits of ...
Bâḳî, sometimes referred to as Baqi, was the name used by one of the greatest of the medieval Ottoman Turkish poets who lived during the 16th century. There have been few more significant contributions to literature in Turkey throughout history and, for this reason, he is known as literally the “Sultan of Poets”. Bâḳî was born Mahmud Abdülbâkî sometime in the year 1526. ...
Abdur Rahim Khankhana, who is also called Rahim by many, was an Indian poet and composer who specialised in Hindi rhyming couplets. He was also responsible translating older works into Persian and for a number of books on astrology. He lived during the reign of Akbar, the Mughal emperor and was appointed as one of the principal group of nine ministers at the royal court. ...
Aaron Southwick was an American poet and substantial landowner of the 19th century whose Quaker descendants could be traced back to the Mayflower arrivals 200 years previously. He was popularly known as the “Bard of Riley”, a settlement that grew up from the large parcel of land that he bought in East Kansas and developed over a number of years. It is ...
The Persian medieval theologian and mystic, and occasional poet, is also commonly referred to as Al-Ghazali or Algazel by historians in the western world. Such was this man’s fame and influence that many rank him second only to the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Muslim world. Conversely, some critics saw his movement from science to faith as detrimental to Islamic scientific progress. He ...
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy was one of the iconic Tolstoy family of 19th century Russia, a second cousin to the more famous Leo Tolstoy. He is more commonly known by the shortened form of A K Tolstoy and, like many of his kin, he was a playwright and novelist as well as being a poet. His historical dramatic works were so significant ...
Although Aleksis Kivi is generally regarded as the national writer of Finland he lived a short and unhappy life in the late 19th century. He wrote a significant number of plays and pieces of verse but his major life project was a novel called Seven Brothers which took him ten years to complete. It was an unsympathetic, uncompromising view of rural Finland and ...
Alexander (Aleksandr) Ivanovich Vvedensky was a radical Russian poet of the first half of the 20th century who belonged to the “Russian Futurism” movement of artists and writers. Their aim was to jettison the “old ways” and the old style of literature in favour of a new direction in keeping with the ever-increasing industrialisation of the country. Vvedensky sought desperately to attach himself ...
