We keep you updated on the world of poetry with our news roundups.
Born in Wellington in 1888, Katherine Mansfield was a writer and poet and an exponent of the modernist movement of the early 20th Century. Raised in a well-to-do family, she spent her childhood in New Zealand before moving to England when she was fifteen. Mansfield began writing at an early age and first published short fiction for her high school magazine in ...
A key figure in Chicago’s African American movement, Margaret Walker was born in Alabama in 1915. Her father was a minister who made sure that his daughter learned about philosophy and ingrained in her a love of poetry from a very early age. They moved to New Orleans where Walker went to school before heading for the city lights of Chicago. She ...
Marcus Garvey was an accomplished speaker, poet and entrepreneur who was born in Jamaica in 1887. He was the last born of eleven children and from a young age became acquainted with the poor employment conditions that the working class of Jamaica had to endure, particularly when he moved to Kingston at 14 years of age. Garvey’s first experience of racism was ...
Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian born writer who, at 18 years of age, fled the turmoil of revolution in his country in 1917, finding a safe haven at first in England, the United States. France and finally Switzerland. He wrote poetry, novels and non-fiction and is probably best known for his most controversial book, published in 1958. Lolita was the story of ...
One of the best-known and most popular Canadian poet, novelist and journalists, Alden Nowlan would overcome great adversity to garner acclaim for his work, such as the Governor General’s Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was born January 25th 1933 in Nova Scotia to a dirt-poor family. Gordon Freeman Nowlan (Alden’s father) was a labourer. His mother was only fifteen years old when ...
Modernist, feminist poet Alfonsina Storni was born May 29th 1892 in Switzerland to Italian/Swiss parents. Her father previously ran a brewery in Argentina but went to live in Switzerland for medical reasons in 1891. In 1896, when Alfonsina was four, the family moved back to San Juan, then to Rosario where Alfonsina later worked in her father’s new tavern. Aware that she had ...
Sayat-Nova was an 18th century Georgian/Armenian poet, musician and sometime royal court diplomat. He entertained courtiers for a while before falling out of favour and then lived the life of the wandering minstrel (local term – ashik). Later in his life he became an apostolic priest in Armenia which was, at that time, a deeply religious country. Records suggest that he was born ...
French poet and novelist Jean Cocteau was born in 1889 near Paris and his early life was marked by the suicide of his father when he was just nine years old. At the age of 15, he left home and went to Paris, publishing his first collection of poetry in 1908. He quickly became involved in the Bohemian art movement of ...
The author of such classic novels as 1984, Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell was also a poet of some renown. Born in India in 1903, Orwell was, at heart, a social democrat who wrote extensively about the scourge of totalitarian states such as Russia as well as the plight of the poor. Born Eric Blair, ...
Modernist poet and triple Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish was born May 7th 1892 in Glencoe, Illinois. His Glasgow-born father Andrew was a merchant and his mother Martha, who could trace her family back to the Mayflower, was a college professor. MacLeish was educated at Yale, where he began his writing career with the Yale Literary Magazine and he won a prize ...
