Peter Stamm
Peter Stamm is a Swiss novelist, short-story writer and radio
dramatist, who prefers to write in German rather than in his native
Schweizerdeutsch, which he speaks at home. He has just turned 50, having
been born on January 18th 1963. Like his father, he studied accountancy
and worked for five years as an accountant. And although he has long
since left that world, his characters, the New York Times once
noted, “often act and think like book-keepers, calculating their
experiences in terms of ratios and costs, gains and losses.”His cool and sparse writing style has been translated into English by Michael Hofmann. His best-known books are Unformed Landscape and, more recently, Seven Years.
“Peter Stamm’s talent is palpable,” said the reviewer, Sarah Fay, in the New York Times. “But what makes him a writer to read, and read often, is the way he renders contemporary life as a series of ruptures. Never entirely sure of their position, his characters engage in a constant effort to establish their equilibrium.”
Vladimir Sorokin, who was born on August 7th 1955, is a post-modern
Russian storyteller and dramatist and one of the most popular writers in
contemporary Russian literature, famous for The Ice Trilogy.
The American novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson was born in
November 1943 and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho. She attended Pembroke
College, the former women’s college at Brown University, receiving her
B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in
1977.
Josip Novakovich, a short-story writer, novelist and writer of
narrative essays, was born in 1956 what is now Croatia and grew up under
the authoritarian rule of Marshal Tito near the Hungarian border in the
central Croatian town of Daruvar. He studied medicine in Serbia, and
then moved to America, where his mother had been born, and continued his
studies, in psychology and then in creative writing, at Vassar College
and at Yale. He lives in Montreal, where he teaches creative writing at
Concordia University, and he has recently taken Canadian citizenship.
Marie NDiaye, born on June 4th 1967, is a French novelist and
playwright. Her father, who was Senegalese, returned to Africa when she
was a baby, and she was raised by her French mother, a secondary-school
science teacher, in a town called Pithiviers, south of Paris.
The Chinese writer, Yan Lianke, lives in Beijing but says his heart
belongs in central Henan province, where he was born in 1958.
Intizar Husain was born in India before partition in Uttar Pradesh,
on December 21st 1925. He emigrated to Pakistan in 1947 and lives in
Lahore.
Lydia Davis is an American writer who was born in Massachusetts in
1947 and is now a professor of creative writing at the University at
Albany, the capital of New York state.
Aharon Appelfeld
U R Ananthamurthy has just celebrated his 80th birthday, having been
born in the village of Melige in the Shimoga district of Karnataka on
December 21st 1932. He is one of the most important representatives of
the “Navya” or “New Movement” in the literature of the Kannada language,
which is spoken by about 50 million people in India and elsewhere,
including in Mauritius, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
