Anniversaries, 13 March
Jack Kerouac
The American author Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. His parents were French-Canadian, and Kerouac did not learn to speak English until he was six. He had a Catholic upbringing, and in 1940 he enrolled at Columbia University, New York. He later dropped out and went to sea. He continued to travel around the United States and the world, often with friends that included Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.
Jack Kerouac started to write little...
Anniversaries, 13 March
Giorgos Seferis
The first Nobel Prize laureate to come out of Greece was born Georgios Seferiades in Urla near Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey), then part of the Ottoman Empire, a city that has also been associated with the birth of Homer. Seferis’ father was a lawyer and university professor; his mother was the daughter of a wealthy landowner.
In 1914, the family moved to Athens where Seferis continued his secondary education. He then went on to read law at the Sorbonne between 1918 and 1925. In 1922, the Turkish A...
Anniversaries, 13 March
Mahmoud Darwish
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birweh in Western Gallilee to a landowning family. His parents were forced to flee on foot when Israeli troops invaded the village in June 1948. Like hundreds of other Palestinian villages, al-Birweh was razed to the ground in order to prevent families moving back to the land that was later occupied by Israel. The Darwish family settled in Deir al-Asad in 1949 and later moved to Haifa where Mahmoud grew up. His first poems were...
Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex (2014)
Sample of authors
Edwardson, Åke
Swedish author and journalist, born in Tranås and raised in Vrigstad and Sävsjö. Åke Edwardson studied history of literature and journalism at Växjö, Göteborg and Lund with a break in 1981–1982 when he served with UN forces in the Middle East. He graduated in 1987 and then worked for the regional dailies Smålänningen and Göteborgs-Posten until he became a freelance writer in 1992, specialising in...