Kenneth Adolf Slessor was born in Orange, New South Wales in 1901 to parents of German-Jewish origin. The family name was originally Schloesser and they moved to Sydney when Kenneth was two years old. The young boy loved to read and was encouraged by his parents to do so, along with teaching him to love music and appreciate good food. In short, ...
Poet, writer and translator, Boris Pasternak is probably best known for his epic work Dr Zhivago. He was born in Moscow in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish parents who were heavily involved in the arts – his father was a professor and painter and his mother was a concert pianist, and they were close friends with Leo Tolstoy. Whilst he initially ...
J.R.R. Tolkien will forever be known as the creator of such memorable characters as hobbits and wizards, and the mythical world of Middle Earth, but he was also a prolific poet. Born in South Africa in 1892, he came to England with his mother three years later for a long family visit, but his father died and they remained in the ...
Irishman Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 and is probably best known today for the fantasy work Gulliver’s Travels. As a satirist, cleric and poet he has influenced writers and artists down the ages, including John Ruskin and George Orwell. Although known for his writing, he also went on to become Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in ...
Known for popular historical novels such as Ivanhoe and The Pirate, writer and poet Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1771. He is notable in that he was popular throughout his lifetime and earned an international reputation that was highly unusual for the time. Many of his works are still seen as classics today and they have been ...
Considered one of the greatest Polish literary figures Czeslaw Milosz was born the 30th June 1911 to a Catholic family in the small village of Szetejnie, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father Aleksander was a qualified civil engineer, whilst his mother Weronika was of noble descent. Fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and French, he saw himself as ...
Lisel Mueller was born in Germany in 1924 but when the Nazi’s came into power her family immigrated to America where she became a much loved poet and translator. Her work explores the difference between what we present publicly and our private, individual selves that people rarely get to see. Over the years she has collected many literary awards including the ...
Son of a wine merchant and born in London around 1340, Geoffrey Chaucer is often considered as the first truly great English writer and is most well-known for his work The Canterbury Tales. Familiar to literary students across the world, this series of poems recounts the stories of various people whilst on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and is written in Middle ...
Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and went on to win an international reputation for both his writing and his work as a translator. His work has embraced both the fantastical and the surreal, exploring wide ranging topics such as philosophy, religion and what was later called magical realism. Although more well-known for his short ...
At various times a journalist, university lecturer, and even pub landlady, poet Jenny Joseph was born in 1932 in Birmingham, England. Thanks to a scholarship, she studied literature at Oxford and there began writing poetry, publishing her first collection in the 1950s. After some time working on newspapers in the UK, Joseph moved for a while to South Africa to write ...
