Author Profile : Derek Walcott

http://thedailystar.net/campus/2007/11/02/autprofile.htm

Derek Alton Walcott, popularly known as Derek Walcott in short, is a West-Indian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Born in 1930 Castries, St Lucia, he later moved to Trinidad in 1952. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott’s life and work.

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. He is best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of Homeric story and tradition into a journey around the Caribbean and beyond to the American West and London.

Walcott founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959, which has produced his plays (and others) since that time, and remains active with its Board of Directors. He also founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University in 1981 with the hope of creating a home for new plays in Boston, Massachusetts. Walcott continues to teach poetry and drama in the Creative Writing Department at Boston University and gives readings and lectures throughout the world. He divides his time between his home in the Caribbean and New York City.

Walcott has published more than twenty plays. The majority of these plays have been produced by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them deal, either directly or indirectly, with the liminal status of the West Indies in the postcolonial period. Epistemological, ontological, economical, political, and social themes make regular appearances in Walcott’s plays.

In his 1970 essay on art (and specifically theatre) in his native region, What the Twilight Says: An Overture (published in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, Walcott bemoans the lasting effects of over 400 years of colonial rule. He reflects on the West Indies as colonized space, and the problems presented by a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: “…we are all strangers here…. Our bodies think in one language and move in another…”. In this manner, Walcott shifts his poetic language between formal English and patois to highlight the linguistic dexterity of the Caribbean people. While recognizing the profound psychological and material wrongs of the colonial project, Walcott simultaneously celebrates the hybridization of Antillean cultures. His epic poem Omeros exposes the complex cultural strains that converge in his native St. Lucia, celebrating at once the European, Amerindian, and African heritage shared by the islanders.

Walcott probes the colonial dialectic in his two-hander Pantomime. In the play, Walcott revisions the story of Robinson Crusoe / Man Friday in an effort to destabilize the colonial power constructs. Reversing the roles of master / servant, Walcott temporarily lends to Trinidadian Jackson, a guest house factotum and calypso singer, the role of Crusoe, with Harry, a British ex-patriate and owner, the identity of “Thursday,” thus resetting Daniel Defoe’s legend in pre-colonial days.

Walcott writes in English, the language of Trinidad, but he also makes full use of the local dialects, or what Barbadian writer Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “nation language,” and portrays Jackson as code-switching throughout the play to reveal his culture’s linguistic dexterity. Walcott’s plays weave together a variety of forms; including those of the folktale, morality play, allegory, fable, ritual and myth; as well as using emblematic and mythological characters to address issues in non-realistic ways.

Sources : nobelprize.org & wikipedia.org

Author Profile : Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Barclay Beckett, also known as Andrew Bellis, is perhaps best known for the timeless play ‘Waiting for Godot’ in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives. Born in 13th April, 1906 in Dublin, Ireland this famous author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 ‘for his writing, whichin new forms for the novel and dramain the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’.

Beckett’s work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition. His work grew increasingly cryptic and attenuated over his career.

The perceived pessimism in Beckett’s work is mitigated both by a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, that Beckett’s portrayal of life’s obstacles serves to demonstrate that the journey, while difficult, is ultimately worth the effort. Similarly, many posit that Beckett’s expressed ‘pessimism’ is not so much for the human condition but for that of an established cultural and societal structure which imposes a stultifying will upon otherwise hopeful individuals; it is the inherent optimism of the human condition, therefore, that is at tension with the oppressive world. Peter Brook says in The Empty Space that if you believe that Beckett is pessimistic, then you are a Beckett character trapped in a Beckett play; Beckett was not saying “No” because he wanted to, but was saying no because he was searching for the “yes”.

Beckett played for the Dublin University Cricket team and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the ‘bible’ of cricket.

Beckett is most renowned for the play Waiting for Godot. In a much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett ‘has achieved a theoretical impossibilitya play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.’ The play was first written in French with the title En attendant Godot. Beckett worked on the play between October 1948 and January 1949. He published it in 1952, and premiered it in 1953. The English translation appeared two years later. The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions by Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times and, later, Kenneth Tynan. In the United States, it flopped in Miami, and had a qualified success in New York City. After this, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the U.S. and Germany. It is still frequently performed today.

Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett’s work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Writers like Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett’s example, but he has had a much wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. In an Irish context, he has exerted great influence on poets such as John Banville, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who proclaim their adherence to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.

Beckett is one of the most widely discussed and highly prized of twentieth century authors, inspiring a critical industry to rival that which has sprung up around James Joyce. He has divided critical opinion. Some early philosophical critics, such as Sartre and Theodor Adorno, praised him, one for his revelation of absurdity, the other for his works’ critical refusal of simplicities; others such as Georg Lukacs condemn for ‘decadent’ lack of realism.

Author Profile : Gabriel García Márquez

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Gabriel García Márquez born on 6th March 1927 in Magdalena, Colombia is one of the most popular Spanish authors of all times. His second novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), is the best-selling of all books originally written in the Spanish language (36 million copies sold as of July 2007). Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. Many people hold that García Márquez ranks alongside his co-writers of the Latin American Boom, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar as one of the world’s greatest 20th-century authors.

García Márquez began his career as a reporter and editor for regional newspapers El Heraldo in Barranquilla and El Universal in Cartagena. It was during this time that he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. García Márquez then worked as a foreign correspondent in Caracas, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, India, and New York City.

García Márquez’s first major work was The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago), which he wrote as a newspaper series in 1955. The book told the true story of a shipwreck by exposing the fact that the existence of contraband aboard a Colombian Navy vessel had contributed to the tragedy due to overweight. This resulted in public controversy, as it discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor. This led to the beginning of his foreign correspondence, as García Márquez became a sort of persona non grata to the government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The series was later published in 1970 and taken by many to have been written as a novel.

Several of his works have been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, notably Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), which tells the tale of a revenge killing recorded in the newspapers, and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985), which is loosely based on the story of his parents’ courtship. Many of his works, including those two, take place in the “García Márquez universe,” in which characters, places, and events reappear from book to book. The works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez often cross genres and most integrate at least a few elements of magical realism. Furthermore, many of his novels and short stories integrate actual history as well as complete fabrication, making his genres sometimes difficult to pin down.

His most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970), has sold more than 36 million copies worldwide. It chronicles several generations of the Buendía family who live in a fictional South American village called Macondo. García Márquez won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972 for One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, with his short stories and novels cited as the basis for the award.

García Márquez is noted for his friendship with Cuban president Fidel Castro and has previously expressed sympathy for some Latin American revolutionary groups, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also been critical of the political situation in Colombia.

Source : Wikipedia

Author Profile : Arundhati Roy

http://www.thedailystar.net/campus/2007/09/05/autprofile.htm

“I think fiction for me has always been a way of trying to

make sense of the world as I know it.”

Arundhati Roy, the author of ‘The God of Small Things’ (for which she won the booker prize in 2002) and ‘An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire’ is one of my most favourite Indian authors. She is also well known as an activist and stood up to protest different instances of injustice that has happened to people in her country and the world.

Roy claims she never rewrites or revises. She has been described as: charming, humorous, strong-willed, independent, energetic, creative, with a great sense of fun, 1.55m of doe-eyed delicateness, a down-to-earth ‘girl next door’, a towering intellect with a poetic fluency with words delivered in a soft modulated voice, a dog-lover. She is 46 years old and describes her two favourite pastimes as ‘writing and running’.

Suzanna Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961 in Meghalaya, India to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women’s rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Ayamenem in Kerala and studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.

Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem. The book received the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. The book reached fourth position in the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. She received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.

The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. She has since devoted herself solely to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States. She also criticizes India’s nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the Narmada Dam project and the power company Enron’s activities in India.

Roy has campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people, with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water and other benefits. Roy donated her Booker prize money (worth $ 1 million) as well as royalties from her books on the project to the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

In 2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project. In its judgement, the Supreme Court of India noted “we feel that the ends of justice would be met if she is sentenced to symbolic one day’s imprisonment besides paying a fine of Rs. 2000.” Roy served the prison sentence and paid the fine. Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy’s Narmada dam activism as well.

Roy counters that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone – “I am hysterical. I’m screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going ‘Shhhh… you’ll wake the neighbours!’ I want to wake the neighbours, that’s my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes”.

Roy has strongly criticised the U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan in reaction to the September 11 attacks, decrying its undermining of international law and institutions, disputing U.S. claims of being a peaceful and freedom-loving nation. She notes its previous support for the Taliban movement as well as the interests of arms and oil industries in formulating foreign policy. She doubts the stated goals of restoring democracy in Afghanistan and argues that the U.S. humanitarian efforts there are a cynical public relations exercise. While condemning the 9/11 attacks, she writes that its response has legitimised violence as a political instrument and aided governments around the world in suppressing freedom, civil rights.

In response to India’s testing of nuclear weapons in Pokhran, Rajasthan, Roy wrote The End of Imagination (1998), a critique of the Indian government’s nuclear policies. It was published in her collection The Cost of Living (1999), in which she also crusaded against India’s massive hydroelectric dam projects in the central and western states of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

Sources : Wikipedia,Lineone.net, Salon.com

Author Profile : Danielle Steel

http://www.thedailystar.net/campus/2007/09/04/autprofile.htm

Danielle Fernande Dominique Schuelein-Steel (born on August 14, 1947 in New York City, New York), is best known as Danielle Steel, and is one of the best selling authors in the United States and around the world.

Best known for her mainstream drama novels, Steel has sold more than 530 million copies of her books (as of 2005). Her novels have been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 390 consecutive weeks and 22 have been adapted for television. Danielle Steel’s estimated net worth as of 1997 was $600-$800 million dollars which has now doubled.

Steel was born on August 14, 1947 in San Fransico, California to John Schulein Steel and Norma da Câmara Stone Reis. Steel spent much of her early childhood in France, where from an early age she was included in her parents’ dinner parties, giving her an opportunity to observe the habits and lives of the wealthy and famous. Her father raised her in New York after her parents got divorced.

Steel started writing stories as a child, and by her late teens had begun writing poetry. A graduate of the Lycée Français de New York, she studied literature design and fashion design, first at Parsons School of Design and then at New York University.

In 1965, when she was only eighteen, Steel married banker Claude-Eric Lazard. While a young wife, and still attending New York University, Steel began writing, completing her first manuscript the following year, when she was nineteen. After the birth of their daughter, Beatrix, in 1968, Steel became a copywriter for an advertising agency, then worked for a public relations agency in San Francisco. A client was highly impressed with her press releases and encouraged her to concentrate on writing books.

From 1981, Steel became a near-permanent fixture on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestsellers lists. In 1989, she was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times Bestseller List for the most consecutive weeks of any author-381 consecutive weeks at that time. Since her first book was published, every one of her novels has hit bestseller lists.

Steel also ventured into children’s fiction, penning a series of 10 illustrated books for young readers. These books, known as the “Max and Martha” series, aim to help children face real life problems: new baby, new school, loss of loved one, etc. In addition, Steel has authored the “Freddie” series. These 4 books address other real life situations: first night away from home, trip to the doctor, etc.

Determined to spend as much time as possible with her own children, Steel often wrote at night, making do with only four hours of sleep, so that she could be with her children during the day. Steel is a prolific author, often releasing several books per year. Each book takes 2 1/2 years to complete, so Steel has developed an ability to juggle up to five projects at once, researching one book while outlining another, then writing and editing additional books.

Steel lives in San Francisco, but also maintains a residence in France where she spends several months of each year and a beach house in La Californie near St. Tropez. Despite her public image and varied pursuits, Steel is known to be shy and because of that and her desire to protect her children from the tabloids, she rarely grants interviews or public appearances.

Steel’s novels have been translated into 28 languages and can be found in 47 countries across the globe. The books, often described as ‘formulaic,’ tend to involve the characters in a crisis of some sort which threatens their relationship. Many of her characters are considered over-the-top, making her books seem less realistic. The novels frequently ‘explore the world of the rich and famous.’

To avoid comparisons to her previous novels, Steel does not write sequels. Twenty-two of her books have been adapted for television, including two that have received Golden Globe nominations. One is “Jewels”, the story of the survival of a woman and her children in World War II Europe, and the family’s eventual rebirth as one of the greatest jewelry houses in Europe. Columbia Pictures was the first movie studio to offer for one of her novels, purchasing the rights to The Ghost in 1998.

In 2002, Steel was decorated by the French government as a “Chevalier” of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, for her contributions to world culture.

Author Profile : P G Wodehouse

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P G Wodehouse is a name that needs no introduction. Regarded as one of the best English comic writers of all times, Wodehouse would remain forever immortal for characters like Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster. One of the most popular internet search engines, ‘ask.com’, originally known as ‘askjeeves.com’ is also based on the popular character Jeeves created by Wodehouse.

Born as Pelham Grenville Wodehouse on 15th October 1881 , Sir P G Wodehouse has enjoyed enormous popular success for more than seventy years. Wodehouse was an acknowledged master of English prose, admired both by contemporaries like Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers like Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Terry Pratchett.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies.

Wodehouse, called “Plum” by most family and friends, was born to Henry Ernest Wodehouse (a British judge in Hong Kong) and Eleanor Wodehouse. He attended boarding school, where he saw his parents only once every six or seven months. Wodehouse grew very close to his brother, who shared his love for art. Wodehouse filled the voids in his life by writing relentlessly. He spent quite a few of his school holidays with one aunt or another; it has been speculated that this gave him a healthy horror of the ‘gaggle of aunts’, reflected in Bertie Wooster’s formidable aunts Agatha and Dahlia, as well as Lady Constance Keeble’s tyranny over her many nieces and nephews in the Blandings Castle series.

He was educated at Dulwich College, London where the library is now named after him, but his anticipated progression to university was stymied by family financial problems. Subsequently he worked for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in London (now known as HSBC) for two years, though he was never interested in banking as a career. He wrote part-time while working in the bank, eventually proving successful enough to take up writing as a full-time profession. He was a journalist with The Globe (a defunct English newspaper) for several years before eventually going to Hollywood, where he earned enormous amounts as a screenwriter. Many of his novels were also serialised in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand.

Although Wodehouse and his novels are considered quintessentially English, from 1924 on he lived largely in France and the United States. He was also profoundly uninterested in politics and world affairs.

Together with his wife he moved permanently to New York after the war. Apart from Leonora, who died during Wodehouse’s internment in Germany, they had no children. He became an American citizen in 1955 and never returned to his homeland, spending the remainder of his life in Remsenburg, Long Island.

He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) shortly before his death at the age of 93. It is widely believed that the honour was not given earlier because of lingering resentment about the German broadcasts. In a BBC interview he said that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted and there was a waxwork of him in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

Many consider Wodehouse as second only to Charles Dickens in the creative skills of character invention. His characters however were not always popular with the establishment, notably the foppish foolishness of Bertie Wooster. His ‘mentally negligible’ good-natured characters invariably make their lot worse by their half-witted schemes to improve a bad situation.

In a manner going back to the stock characters of Roman comedy (such as Plautus), Wodehouse’s servants are frequently far cleverer than their masters. This is quintessentially true with Jeeves, who always pulls Bertie Wooster out of the direst scrapes.

Although his plots are on the surface formulaic, Wodehouse’s genius lied in the tangled layers of comedic complications that the characters must endure to reach the invariable happy ending. Typically, a relative or friend makes some demand that forces a character into a bizarre situation that seems impossible to recover from, only to resolve itself in a clever and satisfying finale. The layers pile up thickly in the longer works, with a character getting into multiple dangerous situations by mid-story. An outstanding example of this is Code of the Woosters where most of the chapters have an essential plot point reversed in the last sentence, catapulting the characters forward into greater diplomatic disasters.

Both the Blandings and Jeeves stories by Wodehouse have been adapted as BBC television series: the Jeeves series has been adapted twice, once in the 1960s (for the BBC), with the title World of Wooster, starring Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster, and Dennis Price as Jeeves and again in the 1990s (by Granada Television for ITV), with the title Jeeves and Wooster, starring Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves.

Author Profile : Alistair MacLean

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Alistair Maclean, author of twenty-nine world bestsellers and recognised as an outstanding writer in his own genre was born on 28th April, 1922 in Glasgow, Scotland. Best known for his ‘The Guns of Navarone’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare’, this famous author was also known by his pseudonym Ian Stuart.

MacLean derived much of his ideas about sea warfare from his experience at the British Royal Navy, where he joined in 1941 and saw hands on action during the World War II. During this war, he played important roles in different missions all across the world, ranging from the Norwegian coast and Aegean Sea to the Far Eastern countries of Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

After getting released from the Navy in 1946, MacLean studied English in the University of Glasgow where he graduated in 1953. Later in his life, this University awarded him with a Doctorate of Literature for his contributions to English literature.

His first novel HMS Ulysses, based on his own war experiences, was a great success and allowed MacLean to be able to devote himself entirely to writing war stories, spy stories and other adventures.

In the early 1960s, MacLean published two novels under the pseudonym “Ian Stuart” in order to prove that the popularity of his books was due to their content rather than his name on the cover. They sold well, but MacLean made no attempt to change his writing style and his fans may easily have recognized him behind the Scottish pseudonym. MacLean’s books eventually sold so well that he moved to Switzerland as a tax exile. From 19631966, he took a hiatus from writing to run a hotel business in England.

Compared to other thriller writers of the time, such as Ian Fleming, MacLean’s books are exceptional in one way at least: they are always short on romance because MacLean thought that such diversions merely serve to slow down the action. Nor do the MacLean books resemble the more recent techno-thriller approach. Instead, he lets little hinder the flow of events in his books, making his heroes fight against seemingly unbeatable odds and often pushing them to the limits of their physical and mental endurance. MacLean’s heroes are usually calm, cynical men entirely devoted to their work and often carrying some kind of secret knowledge. A characteristic twist is that one of the hero’s closest co-operators turns out a traitor.

Nature, especially the sea and the arctic north, plays an important part in MacLean’s stories, and he used a variety of exotic parts of the world as settings to his books. Only one of them, When Eight Bells Toll, is set in his native Scotland. MacLean’s best books are often those in which he was able to make use of his own direct knowledge of warfare and sea fare such as HMS Ulysses which is now considered a classic of naval fiction.

Many of MacLean’s novels were made into films, but none completely captured the level of detail and the intensity of his writing style as exemplified in classics such as Fear is the Key; the two most artistically and commercially successful film adaptations were The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare.

MacLean’s later books were not as well received as the earlier ones and, in an attempt to keep his stories in keeping with the time, he sometimes lapsed into overly improbable plots. He also struggled constantly with alcoholism, which eventually brought about his death in Munich in 1987.