Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ (1908 – April 24, 1974) was an Indian Hindi poet, who is considered as one of the most important modern Hindi poets. Dinkar emerged as a rebellious poet with his nationalist poetry in pre-Independence days. His poetry exuded veer rasa, and he has been hailed as a ‘Rashtrakavi’.Dinkar was born in a […]
Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) was one of the most widely travelled scholars of India, who spent forty-five years of his life on travel and away from home. He became a buddhist monk and eventually drew towards Marxist Socialism. He was given the title of Mahapandit (great scholar).India is known as land of great saints and scholars.
Raghuvir Sahay (1928-1990) is among the most significant figures on the modern literary scene in India. He represents a generation that grew with the aspirations of the freedom movement in the subcontinent, lived to see the unfolding of what this freedom meant for people at large, and gave voice to the unfulfilled aspirations. He died
Rabindranath Tagore was born on Tuesday, 7th May 1861 in a wealthy family in Calcutta at the address of 6, Dwarakanath Thakur Lane, Calcutta. He was the ninth son of Debenadranath and Sarada Devi. His grand father Dwarakanath Tagore was a rich landlord and social reformer. Even though he was from a very wealthy family,
R. K. Narayan was born in Madras, India on October 10, 1906. His father was a provincial head-master. He was the third of eight surviving children. His full name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami. In South India, the given name(s) is/are usually written last. His first name is a toponym and his second name is
Born in 1927 in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, Qurratulain Hyder was one of the most celebrated of Urdu fiction writers. A trendsetter in Urdu fiction, she began writing at a time when the novel was yet to take deep roots as a serious genre in the poetry-oriented world of Urdu literature. She shook it out of
Phanishwar Nath Renu is a revolutionary novelist of the post-Premchand era of the Hindi literature. He was the voice of the contemporary rural India and among the pioneers to bring regional voices into the mainstream Hindi literature.He was born on 4th March 1921 in Aurahi Hingna in the district of Purnia. He received his primary
Pearl S. Buck was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent her youth in China, in Chinkiang on the Yangtse River. She learned to speak Chinese before she could speak English. Her parents were missionaries. Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a humorless, scholarly man who spent years translating the Bible from Greek to Chinese. Her
This Chilean poet, and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His original name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he used the pen name Pablo Neruda for over 20 years before adopting it legally in 1946. Neruda is the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on,
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin to unconventional parents. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1820-96), was a poet and journalist. Her pen name was Sperenza. Wilde’s father was Sir William Wilde, an Irish antiquarian, gifted writer, and specialist in diseases of the eye and ear, who founded a hospital in Dublin
Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. With Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo, Paz is one of the several Latin American poets whose work has had wide international impact. Although many of Paz’s poems are developed within the discipline of regular meter and rhyme, he has also experimented
O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter in Greenboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his parental grandmother and paternal aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in
Baidyanath Mishra was born in Mithila (Bihar) in Satlakha, his mother’s village. His native village, Tarauni, is not far away from Satlakha. He was brought up in his native village. As per the tradition of those days, the child was admitted to a Sanskrit pathshala (school). Thereafter, he studied Sanskrit at Kashi and Calcutta and
Munshi Premchand was born on 31July 1880 in a small village, Lamhi, near Varanasi. His parents named him Dhanpat Rai. He started writing at a young age. Initially, he wrote in Urdu. Later, he wrote only in Hindi.Munshi Premchand was the son of a postal clerk. He lost his mother when he was very young.
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar as the son of Lal Chand, a coppersmith and soldier, and Ishwar Kaur. He attended Khalsa College, Amritsar, and entered the University of Punjab in 1921, graduating with honours in 1924. Thereafter Anand did his additional studies at Cambridge and at London University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1929.