Writers – Page 9 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Kazuo Ishiguro

A short biography of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Never Let Me Go, told through five facts

1. Kazuo Ishiguro was born on the same day as several other writers. 8 November 1954 seems, in fact, to have been a remarkably popular day for authors to arrive in the world: author of showbiz biographies David Bret and American journalist and author Timothy Egan were also born on the same day. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in Japan – one of the two cities that had been blasted by the atomic bomb just nine years earlier – but in 1960 he moved with his parents to England.

Five Fascinating Facts about Dystopian Fiction

Interesting facts about dystopian novels and the history of the genre

In a previous post, we recommended 10 of the best early dystopian novels and offered some insight into how they came about. This might be considered a follow-up post to that earlier one, offering a brief history of dystopian fiction in five interesting facts.

1. The word ‘dystopia’ is older than you might think – but then, so is the genre. The word ‘dystopia’ has been traced back to 1747, where it appears as ‘dustopia’, but is clearly being used with the same meaning as the modern ‘dystopia’. Although dystopian fiction itself is sometimes said to have begun with the 1908 Jack London novel The Iron Heel, there are several Victorian novels which qualify as dystopian fiction, at least of sorts. One of these is Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon – the title, almost the word ‘nowhere’ backwards, explicitly signals its intention to reverse the idea of utopia (which literally means ‘no-place’) – in which Butler satirises the imaginary utopian world he depicts.

Five Fascinating Facts about Elizabeth Gaskell

Interesting facts from the life of Mrs Gaskell, Victorian novelist, author of North and South

1. She wrote her first novel to console herself when she was grieving for the death of her son. The Gaskells’ only son Willie died of scarlet fever in 1845. Partly as a response to his death, Mrs Gaskell – she is still often known by the married title, although some readers now refer to her as Elizabeth Gaskell – set about writing Mary Barton, her ‘tale of Manchester life’. It was published in 1848 to huge acclaim.

Five Fascinating Facts about Nathaniel Hawthorne

Fun facts from the life of the great nineteenth-century American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. Nathaniel added the ‘w’ to his family name in an attempt to distance himself from this controversial ancestry. The young Hathorne – later rechristened ‘Hawthorne’ – spent several childhood years living in Salem, Massachusetts, though his mother also lived in Maine as well. (Nathaniel’s father had died when his son was just aged four in the Dutch colony of Suriname.) Alongside Hathorne was one Andrew Elliott, ancestor of the poet T. S. Eliot.

10 Robert Burns Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robert Burns (1759-1796) wrote many classic poems and songs, so whittling down his complete works to just ten recommendations has been hard. Nonetheless, there are a few poems that simply have to be on any list of Burns’s best poems, so we hope that most of our choices here won’t seem too perverse or controversial.

But which is Robert Burns’s finest poem? We’ve presented the selection below in order, concluding with what we think is Burns’s best poem, but really there were a good four or five that could’ve taken the top spot