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Gao Xinjiang |
The Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 2000 was awarded to the Chinese writer Gao Xinjian who has been living in exile in a Paris suburb since 1987. He became the first Chinese to win the Noble Prize in Literature for his book Soul Mountain hailed by the Swedish Academy as "one of the singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves." The prize money was $900,000. He was born in 1940 and is both a novelist as well as a playwright. He is considered to be the master of Chinese language. His other major work is One man's Bible, a semi- autobiographical account of the Cultural Revolution in China. |
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Gunther Grass |
The German novelist, poet,
playwright and sculptor Gunther Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Gunther
Grass was born in 1927, October 16 at Danzig. His father was a Polish and his mother a
German. At present, he lives at a place called Berlinderf near Hamburg. Some of his famous works are The Tin Drum, The Flounder (1977), The Meeting at Telgte (1978), Son (1949), Cat and Mouse (1961), Dogs Ear (1963), For Pledge (1967), The Rat(1986), The Call of The Road (1992), The Distance field (1995), The Germans are Dying Out (1980), My Century (1999), Speak Out: Speeches, Open Letters,Commentaries and Local Anaesthic (1969), From the Diary of a Snail (1972). |
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Toni Morrison |
Toni Morrison was born in
Lorraine, Ohio in 1931. From her childhood, she enjoyed learning about black music,
storytelling, myth and folklores. In 1953, she graduated from Howard University with a
degree in English. In 1955, she eared her masters degree at Cornell and then taught at Texas Southern University. Two years later, she came back to Howard and married architect Harold Morrison. In 1956, she became a text book editor for Random House and in 1959, she became a senior editor in its trade department. She also taught at State University of New York (1969-1970), Yale University (1975-1977) and Bard College (1979-1980). Her first work was The Bluest Eye (1970) which is about a young girl who desired for unattainable physical beauty. In 1974, she had written Sula, a novel about a 20-year friendship between two girls in the 1920s. Her novel Songs of Solomon (1977) received the National Book Critics Circle Award and she was appointment to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1978, then president , Jimmy Carter appointed her to the National Council of the Arts. She is the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League university. Her biography was featured in the PBS Series Writers In America. Her other works include Tar Baby (1981) which made her the first black woman to be featured on the front cover of Newsweek. In 1987, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, a moving account about the harsh legacy of slavery. She received the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature for her book Jazz. Morrison was the first Afro-American and the eighth woman to win the award. |
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Naguib Mahfouz |
Naguib Mahfouz born in
Cairo, Egypt in December11, 1911. He has written over 30 novels and more than 100 short
stories. In 1988, he became the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He still lives in Cairo with his wife and daughters. |
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Rudyard Kipling |
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1907) was born in Bombay. He was brought to England in 1871. He worked as a journalist in India from 1878 to 1882. His major works include "The Light that Failed", "Stalky and Co.", "Departmental Ditties", "Plain Tales From the Hills, "Soldiers Three", "Wee Winkie", "Barrack Room Ballads". His books for children are "The Jungle Book", "Just So Stories", Puck of Pook's Hill" and "Rewards and Fairies." But his most acclaimed novel would be Kim set in India then under the British. His autobiography is called "Something of Myself". |
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Seamus Heaney |
Seamus Justin
Heaney (1939- ), the poet was born in Ireland. He was
educated at St. Columb's College, Derry, and Queen's University, Belfast. He went back to
his nation in 1972 after teaching poetry at Queen's for six years. He first lived in
Co.Wicklow and then in Dublin. His poetry collections are Eleven Poems, Death of
a naturalist, Door into the Dark, Field Wintering Out, North and Field
Work. His Selected Poems, 1965-1975 was published in 1980. Preoccupations, a
collection of essays and lectures from 1968 to 1978 was published in 1980. |
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William Faulkner |
William Harrison Faulkner (1897-1962) was born in New
Albany, Mississippi on September 25. He spent most of his life there, in the town of
Oxford. He attended the University of Mississippi. He got enlisted in Royal Air Force in
Canada in 1918. He did many jobs before landing as a writer. His first published novel
was Soldiers' Pay (1926). Most of his novels were set in the imaginary town called
Yoknapatawpha County. He was even the Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957-1958. He was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize in 1949. His other works are Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Abaslom Abaslom (1936), The Hamlet (1940) and Intruder in the Dust (1948). He has even written several volumes of short stories, one such is published by Modern Library under the titled Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner. It contains altogether 13 of Faulkner's finest short stories. William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962. |
