Born in 1940 in Michigan, an orphan who spent his fifteenth year incarcerated in a mental hospital and faked his death at just the age of 26, Bill Knott, also known as Saint Geraud, was one of the most enigmatic American poets of the 20th Century. Often verging on the surreal, Knott’s poetry covers a range of subject matter from the way ...
Heinrich Heine was a Jewish born poet who became a highly controversial figure in German literature and was also something of a visionary. He quite clearly prophesied the terrible times to come for the Jewish people in a play that he wrote in 1821. In Almansor he wrote about the burning of books for political or religious reasons and the line: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, ...
Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote poetry in the Urdu language while holding strong political views all through his life that often got him into trouble with the law. He served a number of prison sentences because of his beliefs but it never changed him. He was a committed communist and was so highly thought of by the Soviets that he was awarded ...
There cannot be many writers in the world who have written a book and then had a seaside resort named after that book, but Charles Kingsley was such a man. He wrote a novel in 1855 called Westward Ho! about sailors from a south western English town who set sail across the Atlantic to battle with the Spanish in the Caribbean. The ...
The first thing that generally springs to mind when considering the great English writer C. S. Lewis is his epic collection of fantasy tales The Chronicles of Narnia. This was actually seven separate stories which can be bought in one bound collection and it probably sits on bookshelves in most houses – particularly if there are children in the house. It is ...
