Lucille Clifton was born Thelma Lucille Sayles into a working class New York family in June 1936. Her father was a steel worker and her mother bore six children. Graduating from High School Lucille won a scholarship to Howard University and then studied at the State University of New York at Fredonia, quite close to her home in Buffalo. Aged 22 she ...
Alan Alexander Milne was the famous writer of the much-loved Winnie the Pooh stories and is more generally known as A. A. Milne. Born in Kilburn, London in 1882 he spent his formative years living in a small independent school which his father, John Vine Milne ran. A. A. was fortunate to have visionary novelist H. G. Wells as one of his ...
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 ...
