Thomas Hardy’s own life wasn’t similar to his stories. He was born on the Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. His father was a master mason and building contractor. Hardy’s mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked […]
Taslima Nasreen was born in August 1962 in a Muslim family in Mymensingh, East Pakistan. Because the area became independent in 1971, her city of birth is now in the country called Bangladesh.Growing up in a highly restrictive and conservative environment, Taslima was fond of literature while she also excelled in science. She started writing when she
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and youngest child of a distinguished family of New England origin. His forebears included the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington University in St. Louis, and on his mother’s side, Isaac Stearns, one of the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Eliot’s father
Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, one of the greatest Hindi poets of all times, was born on February 16, 1896. His father, Ram Sahai Tripathi, held double charge under the then king of Mahishadal in Bengal as a Police Officer and keeper of the State Treasury. His mother died when he was hardly 3 years old. ‘Nirala’
Subramania Bharathi was born to Chinnaswaamy Aiyyar and Lakshmi Ammaal in 1882 at Ettayapuram. He lost his mother at the age of 5.He learnt music from very young age and at 11 and was invited to a conference of Ettayapuram court poets and musicians for composing poems and songs. He accepted a challenge and composed
Sigmund Freud was born of Jewish parentage in Freiburg, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic), the first of seven children. His mother Amalia Nathansohn was twenty years younger than his father, the wool merchant Jakob Freud; Amalia was his third wife. The family moved in 1860 to Vienna, where discriminating laws against the Jews had
Shobha De is an eminent Indian novelist, who is often known as India’s Jackie Collins. She was born as Shobha Rajadhyaksha to the Saraswat Brahmin family of Maharashtra on the January 7, 1947. She completed her graduation from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and obtained degree in Psychology.In the beginning of her career, she worked as
Sharat Chandra Chatterji, one of thee greatest writers India has produced, was born on September 15, 1876 at Debanandapur in Hooghly district. He spent his boyhood and youth at Bhagalpur. Sharat Chandra passed the Entrance Examination in 1894 but could not appear at the next higher examination as he could not pay the examination fees.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Muslim family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964 Rushdie’s parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus—during these years there was
Saadat Hasan Manto (May 11, 1912–January 18, 1955) was a Pakistani Urdu short story writer of Kashmiri ancestry who was born in Samrala in the Ludhiana district of the Indian state of Punjab.He was one of the best short story tellers of the 20th century, and one of the most controversial as well. He is
Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan Agyeya is a pioneer of modern trends in the realm of Indian poetry. In literature, Hindi moved from a phase of revivalist cultural nationalism in the 1910s to mainstream Gandhian nationalism in the 1920s and the early 1930s.Over the following two decades Hindi, while firmly rooted in native ground, opened up and
Jalal al-Din Rumi, known to his disciples as Maulana Rumi, was born in Balkh, Ghurid empire (now in Afghanistan). His father, Bahauddin Walad, was a jurist and preacher. The family moved from place to place, perhaps because political reasons or because Bahauddin Walad did not have success as a preacher. Also the times were violent.
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an arts and crafts teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art. His mother, the former Alice Macdonald, was a sister-in-law of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. India was at that time ruled by the British. Ruddy, as Kipling was affectionally called, was
American poet, one of the finest of rural New England’s 20th century pastoral poets. Frost published his first books in Great Britain in the 1910s, but he soon became in his own country the most read and constantly anthologized poet, whose work was made familiar in classrooms and lecture platforms. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, south London, as the son of Robert Browning, a wealthy clerk in the Bank of England, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, of German-Scottish origin. Robert Browning Senior had spent in his youth some time on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where he become disgusted at the slaves’ treatment. Back