For many Australians, Louisa Lawson was a major force in allowing women to vote in the country but she was also a talented poet and journalist. She was born in Guntawang in New South Wales, the second of 12 children to Harriet and Henry Albury. Educated at Mudgee National School she was offered a chance to go into teaching when she ...
Poet Julian Tuwim was born into a middle class Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, in 1894 and went on to become one of the major figures in Polish poetry, helping to found the experimental Skamander group in 1918. As a young man he wasn’t considered to be committed to his studies and even had to re-sit his sixth grade at school. Living ...
More widely remembered for his sculpture of David and painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a poet and engineer who was born in Tuscany in 1475. His father worked in a governmental position and his mother suffered from various ailments during his early life and died when he was just 6 years old. Michelangelo was interested in painting ...
Joseph O’Connor is a multi-award winning Dublin-born novelist, playwright, journalist and broadcaster. At the age of 51 he can look back on considerable success over his lifetime. He comes from a talented family of five children including the well-known singer and songwriter Sinead O’Connor who first came to international attention with her haunting song Nothing Compares to You. Another sister has taken ...
It would be fair to say that the Australian poet John Shaw Neilson succeeded as a popular poet despite his lack of sophistication and education. He was raised in a working class environment with very little schooling and spent a good part of his adult life doing manual labour on the construction of roads and dams. This he managed without being a ...
