Anniversaries, 11 March
Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams was a British author born in Cambridge. His father had studied theology, but worked as a probation officer and later lectured on probation theory and practice. Adams’s mother was a nurse at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. When his parents divorced in 1957 he moved with his mother and sister to his grandparents who were running an RSPCA shelter in Brentwood, Essex. While at school, Adams preferred science to humanities and writing until he became the first pupil at Bre...
Anniversaries, 11 March
Leena Lehtolainen
Leena Katriina Lehtolainen is a Finnish author. She was born in Vesanto and grew up in Outokumpu, Northern Karelia. Lehtolainen’s parents were both university lecturers. She obtained a licentiate degree from the University of Helsinki with a thesis on the subject of the Finnish crime novelist Eeva Tenhunen. She was an assistant and lecturer at the department of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki in 1990–91, and she was previously a critic and columnist. She was elected to the boa...
Anniversaries, 11 March
Janosch
Pseudonym for Horst Wessel Eckert. His father christened him Horst Wessel (1907–1930) after an SA-Sturmführer who was hailed as a martyr by the Nazis after they claimed he was killed by Communists. Wessel wrote the lyrics to the "Horst Wessel-Lied", the official battle song of the German Nazi party and the national anthem during the Third Reich (1933–1945).
Janosch was born in Zabrze in Poland, then on the border between Germany and Poland. The family was extremely poor, and Janosch grew up wi...
Photo: Robert Ahlbom / Forflex
Sample of authors
Forsyth, Frederick
Frederick Forsyth is a major author of political thrillers. He was born in Ashford, Kent, England, as the only child in a family of furriers. He became interested in books as a young child and attended Tonbridge School, a public school where he showed a great gift for languages, and he dreamed of becoming a journalist, preferably foreign correspondent. Aviation was another major interest, and...