Arthur Miller Biography Arthur Miller was America’s foremost post-war playwright. His works, intricate musings on the darkness at the heart of the American Dream, struck a chord with a whole generation of theatre-goers throughout the world. Arthur Miller was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1915.  His grandparents had come to America […]

In 1830, Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti; her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a painter. Rossetti’s first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym […]

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his […]

Famed writer and educator Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in the Igbo town of Ogidi in eastern Nigeria.  After becoming educated in English at the University of Ibadan and a subsequent teaching job, in 1961, Achebe joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation as director of external broadcasting. Prior to joining […]

The son of Robert Browning, a Bank of England clerk, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, of Scottish-German descent, Browning received little formal education. His learning was gleaned mainly from his Father’s library at home in Camberwell, South London, where he learnt something, with his Father’s help, of Latin and Greek and also read Shelly, Byron and […]

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757, in London, England, the third son of Catherine Wright and James Blake – a hosier and haberdasher on Broad Street in Golden Square, Soho. Young William was prone to fantastic visions, including seeing God, and angels in a tree. He would later claim that he had regular […]

On May 1st 2009, Carol Ann Duffy became the UK’s twentieth Poet Laureate. She is one of Britain’s best known and most admired poets. Her poems appeal to those who wouldn’t usually read poetry and they appear on the national curriculum.  She writes of life in all its sadness – life: that “infinitely gentle, infinitely […]

Gabriel Okara, in full Gabriel Imomotimi Gbaingbain Okara   (born April 21, 1921, Bumodi, Nigeria), is a Nigerian poet and novelist whose verse had been translated into several languages. A largely self-educated man, Okara became a book-binder after leaving school and soon began writing plays and features for radio.  In 1953 his poem “The Call of the River Nun” won […]

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in Western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a playwright at the Royal Court […]

Novelist, poet and feminist Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. Alice Walker is one of the most admired African-American writers working today.  The youngest daughter of sharecroppers, she grew up poor.  Her mother worked as a maid to help support the family’s eight children. When Walker was 8 years […]

John Keats, one of the greatest English poets and a major figure in the Romantic movement, was born in 1795 in Moorfields, London.  His father died when he was eight and his mother when he was 14; these sad circumstances drew him particularly close to his two brothers, George and Tom, and his sister Fanny. […]

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire and was baptised on 26 April 1564. His father was a glovemaker and wool merchant and his mother, Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do local landowner. Shakespeare was probably educated in Stratford’s grammar school. The next documented event in Shakespeare’s life is his marriage in 1582 […]

Vernon Scannell was born in 1922, in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, with the surname Bain. Scannell left school at 14 and got a job in an accountant’s office, but his real interests were boxing and literature. He was a very good boxer at school and loved reading. In 1940, when he was 18, Scannell joined the army […]

David Herbert Lawrence, the fourth of the five children of Arthur John Lawrence a miner, was born in Eastwood near Nottingham on the 11th September, 1885. His father was barely literate, but his mother, Lydia Lawrence, was better educated and was determined that David and his brothers should not become miners. As a child Lawrence […]

UA Fanthorpe, who died aged 79, had almost reached her 50th birthday before she published her first collection of poems.  Side Effects (1978) was the work of a late starter who had secretly nursed literary ambitions but waited until she had found subjects that would fully engage a fertile and compassionate imagination. Born in 1929 […]

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast on 12 September 1907. Both of his parents were originally from the West of Ireland. His father, John, was a Church of Ireland bishop. His mother Elizabeth suffered from poor health. When Louis was very young, the family moved to Carrickfergus. Louis loved the new house and garden, which […]

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30th 1865, son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture, and his wife Alice. Young Rudyard’s earliest years in Bombay were blissfully happy, in an India full of exotic sights and sounds.  But at the tender age of five he was sent back […]

Saroji Naidu also known by the nickname ‘The Nightingale of India’, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist and poet.  Naidu was the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the Governor of Uttar Pradesh state.  She was a great patriot, politician, orator and […]

Thomas Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on June 2, 1840, where his father worked as a master mason and builder.  From his father he gained an appreciation of music, and from his mother an appetite for learning and the delights of the countryside about his rural home. Hardy was frail as a child, […]