Born around 1728 in County Longford in Ireland, Oliver Goldsmith was a poet and novelist who is perhaps best known for his poem The Deserted Village that rails against the collection of wealth for wealth’s sake and the move of people away from rural areas into the cities. Goldsmith went to study in Dublin at Trinity College when he was just 16 ...
Born in 1933, Romanian poet and essay writer Nichita Stanescu grew up under the influence of World War II and the subsequent rise of communism across the Easter Block. Probably more famous in his own country than the rest of the world, never the less Stanescu remains one of the more important figures of literature in the 20th Century. Stanescu spent most ...
Born in 1809 in Bredfield, England, Edward FitzGerald was a poet and writer and is perhaps most famous for his translation of the Persian work The Rubáiyát of Khayyám. He was raised in a wealthy family and spent part of his youth in Paris before attending school in Bury St Edmunds and then going onto Cambridge University in 1826. FitzGerald made friends ...
Born in 1919, Primo Levi was a writer and poet, a Jew born in Italy who survived the holocaust of World War II. Imprisoned in Auschwitz, perhaps his most well-known work was If This is a Man which was an account of his time there. He was brought up and schooled in Turin where his father worked in the manufacturing business. Levi ...
A Jewish poet and writer in the dark days of Nazi rule, Nelly Sachs was born in Berlin in 1891. Her father was a wealthy manufacturer and was very protective of her. Sachs suffered ill health in her childhood that meant she was tutored at home for much of the time. Her early life as a shy woman who lived a sheltered ...
