Taslima Nasreen was born in August 1962 to a Muslim family in Mymensingh, East Pakistan. Because the area became independent in 1971, her city of birth is now in the country called Bangladesh.
Growing up in a highly restrictive and conservative environment, Taslima was fond of literature while she also excelled in science. She started writing when she was 15 years old, beginning with poetry in literary magazines, and afterwards herself editing a literary periodical called SeNjuti (1978 - 1983). She was the president of a literary organization while in medical college, where she staged many cultural programs. Earning her medical degree in 1984, she worked in public hospitals for eight years.
Her first book of poetry was published in 1986. Her second became a huge success in 1989, and editors of progressive daily and weekly newspapers suggested that she write regular columns. Next she started writing about women's oppression. In 1992 she received the prestigious literary award Ananda from West Bengal in India for her Nirbachito Kolam (Selected Columns), the first writer from Bangladesh to earn that award. Despite allegations of jealousy among other writers about this, the topmost intellectuals and writers continued to support her.
Islamic fundamentalists launched a campaign against her in 1990, staging street demonstrations and processions. No longer was she welcomed to any public places, not even to book fairs that she loved to visit. In 1993, a fundamentalist organization called Soldiers of Islam issued a fatwa against her, a price was set on her head because of her criticism of Islam, and she was confined to her house.
The government confiscated her passport and asked her to quit writing if she hoped to keep her job as a medical doctor in Dhaka Medical College Hospital... She was thus forced to quit her job.
Inasmuch as she had become a best-selling author in Bangladesh and West Bengal in India, she managed to survive the hostility. Wherever she lived, she fought for human rights and women’s rights. In 1998, without the government's permission she risked a return, to be with her ailing mother. Again, fundamentalists demanded she be killed. When her mother - a religious Muslim - died, nobody came from any mosque to lead her funeral, her crime being that she was the mother of an 'infidel'. A case again was filed against her on the charges of hurting religious feelings of the people. After a few weeks of staying, Taslima was forced to leave her country once more. Taslima was desperate to see her father when he was ill, but the government did not let her go to Bangladesh. Her passport was not renewed, her rights as a citizen had constantly been violated by the governmental authority.
Taslima has been living in exile in Europe. She has written twenty eight books of poetry, essays, novels, and short stories in her native language of Bengali. One Bangladesh court sentenced her in absentia to a one-year prison term. The Bangladesh government has recently banned three other of her books, Amar Meyebela (My girlhood), Utol Hawa (Wild wind) and Sei sob ondhokar(Those dark days).
Writers and intellectuals both in Bangladesh and West Bengal went to court to ban her autobiography Ko( speak up) and Dwikhandito( Split in Two). Two million-dollar defamations suits were filed against Taslima by her fellow writers. The West Bengal government finally managed to ban Dwikhandito on the charges of hurting religious feelings of the people. A Human Rights organization in Kolkata flied a case against West Bengal government for banning a book that is against freedom of expression. After two years, the ban was lifted by the Kolkata High Court, which, Taslima says, is a victory for freedom of expression.
The numerous prestigious awards she has received in western countries have resulted in increased international attention to her struggle for women's rights and freedom of expression. She has become a symbol of free-speech. Taslima now lives in between three cities on three continents, Kolkata, Stockholm, and New York.
www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/
James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated by Jesuits at Clogowes Wood College and at Belvedere College (just up the road from the Centre) before going on to University College, then located on St Stephen’s Green, where he studied modern languages.After he graduated from university, Joyce went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, and was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, the Galway woman who was to become his partner and later his wife. In August 1904 the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others, but in October Joyce and Nora left Ireland going first to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) where Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school. After he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912, after which he never returned to Ireland. Six months after their arrival in Pola, they went to Trieste where they spent most of the next ten years. Joyce and Nora learned the local Triestino dialect of Italian, and Italian remained the family’s home language for many years. Joyce wrote and published articles in Italian in the Piccolo della Sera newspaper and even gave lectures on English literature. This portrait of Nora was painted by the Italian artist Tullio Silvestri in Trieste just before World War One.1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His collection of short stories, Dubliners, on which he had been working since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles. Having cleared his desk, Joyce could then start in earnest on the novel he had been thinking about since 1907: Ulysses. With the start of World War One, Joyce and Nora, along with their two children, Georgio and Lucia, were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. The family had little money, relying on subventions from friends and family, people like Harriet Weaver in London and Nora’s uncle in Galway.
IRWIN ALLEN GINSBERG
Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Paterson. His father Louis Ginsberg was a poet and a high school teacher. Ginsberg's mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg (who was affected by epileptic seizures and mental illnesses such as paranoia) was an active member of the Communist Party and often took Ginsberg and his brother Eugene to party meetings. Ginsberg later said that his mother "Made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.'"
As a young teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues such as World War II and workers' rights.When he was in junior high school, he accompanied his mother by bus to her therapist. The trip disturbed Ginsberg — he mentioned it and other moments from his childhood in his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)."While in high school, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman; he said he was inspired by his teacher's passion in reading.
In 1943, Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School and briefly attended Montclair State University before entering Columbia University on a scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson in 1949.
In Ginsberg's freshman year at Columbia he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes. They bonded because they saw in one another excitement about the potential of the youth of America, a potential which existed outside the strict conformist confines of post-WWII McCarthy-era America[citation needed].
Ginsberg is buried in his family plot in Gomel Chesed Cemetery, one of a cluster of Jewish cemeteries at the corner of McClellan Street and Mt. Olivet Avenue near the city lines of Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey. The family plot, located toward the western edge of the cemetery at the far end of the walk from the third gate along Mt. Olivet Avenue, is marked by a large Ginsberg and Litzky stone, and Ginsberg himself and each family member have smaller markers. Though the grave itself and the cemetery are neither picturesque nor otherwise notable (Ginsberg's grave is located near the rear fence of the flat cemetery, which is in the midst of an industrial area), and it has not become a major place of pilgrimage, there is a steady trickle of visitors as indicated by a handful of stones always on his marker and the occasional book or other item left by other poets and admirers.
MARGARET ATWOOD
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iOzjAxCFrHY
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Atwood is the secod of three children of Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist, and Margaret Dorothy Killiam, a former dietician and nutritionist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 11 years old. She became a voracious reader of refined literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto and graduated in 1957. Atwood began writing at age six and realised she wanted to write when she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French.
In the fall of 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately-printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for 2 years, but never finished because she never completed a dissertation on “The English Metaphysical Romance” in 1967. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
Margaret Atwood is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has been presented with the Order of Ontario and the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, and has been awarded sixteen honorary degrees. She has lived in many places including Canada, England, Scotland and France, and currently lives in Toronto. Her most recent books are The Tent (2006) - a collection of fictional essays; and The Door (2007) - her latest collection of poetry.
ALICE WALKERwww.aalbc.com/authors/alice.htm
She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Colour Purple. Among her numerous awards and honours are the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters, a nomination for the National Book Award, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Merrill Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York. She also has received the Townsend Prize and a Lyndhurst Prize.
Nowadays, Alice Walker is known as a great expositor of the African American Literature. In her works, she always let us know some aspects of woman condition, which is the case of ‘The Colour Purple’, a novel taken by Steven Spielberg to make the film which has the same name as the novel. Color Purple narrates the history of ‘Celie’, a black girl and she is treated after being sold to a farmer, as a salve. As this novel, many others, poems, essays, and short stories written by her, are focused on how poor people, black people, and also those with some incapacities are being treated by society. Also the way she writes has contributed to the expansion of the African American Literature, making more people show their interest on demonstrate some social and political aspects which black people have to deal with, as it is the case of her only daughter, Rebecca Walker, who is following her mother’s steps, writing some text books about these same topics. Alice Walker, as mentioned before, has added many books to the African American literature. Her first poems were published in 1968, in a book titled ‘Once’. The poems of this book were written after her returned from a trip to Africa. Nowadays, she is a recognizable figure around the world, especially in Cuba, where her last book, Meridiana, was published on February 15th, 2004.
ISAAC ASIMOVhttp://www.notablebiographies.com/An-Ba/Asimov-Isaac.
Early life: Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia, then part of the Smolensk district in the Soviet Union. He was the first of three children of Juda and Anna Rachel Asimov. Although his father made a good living, changing political conditions led the family to leave for the United States in 1923. The Asimovs settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they owned and operated a candy store. Asimov was an excellent student who skipped several grades. In 1934 he published his first story in a high school newspaper. A year later he entered Seth Low Junior College, an undergraduate college of Columbia University. In 1936 he transferred to the main campus and changed his major from biology to chemistry. During the next two years Asimov's interest in history grew, and he read numerous books on the subject. He also read science fiction magazines and wrote stories. Asimov graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1939.
Early influences: Asimov's interest in science fiction had begun as a boy when he noticed several of the early science fiction magazines for sale on the newsstand in his family's candy store. His father refused to let him read them. But
When a new magazine appeared on the scene called Science Wonder Stories, Asimov convinced his father that it was a serious journal of science, and as a result he was allowed to read it. Asimov quickly became a devoted fan of science fiction. He wrote letters to the editors, commenting on stories that had appeared in the magazine, and tried writing stories of his own.
Growing fame: During the 1940s Asimov earned a master's degree and a doctorate, served during World War II (1939–45) as a chemist at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and became an instructor at Boston University School of Medicine. He also came to be considered one of the three greatest writers of science fiction in the 1940s (along with Robert Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt), and his popularity continued afterward. Stories such as "Nightfall" and "The Bicentennial Man," and novels such as The Gods Themselves and Foundation's Edge, received numerous honors and are recognized as among the best science fiction ever written.
Asimov's books about robots—most notably I, Robot, The Caves of Steel, and The Naked Sun—won respect for science fiction by using elements of style found in other types of books, such as mystery and detective stories. He introduced the "Three Laws of Robotics": "1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws." Asimov said that he used these ideas as the basis for "over two dozen short stories and three novels … about robots." The three laws became so popular, and seemed so sensible, that many people believed real robots would eventually be designed according to Asimov's basic princ
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/doris-lessing/
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=cesgfRL4fkA&feature=related
The heroines who populate the work of Doris Lessing belong to the avant garde of their day. Leftist, fiercely independent, feminist, her characters, like Lessing herself, are social critics rebelling against the cultural restrictions of their societies. And like their creator, Lessing's heroines populate two geographies: Southern Africa and England. Lessing's fiction closely parallels her own life. Her characters have experienced her experiences; they know what she knows.
The daughter of an English banker, Doris May Taylor was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), on October 22, 1919. In 1925 the Taylor family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to a farm 100 miles west of Mozambique. Lessing's childhood was spent in the hills near the farm. She attended convent school until an eye problem forced her to drop out at age 14. At that point her self-education began, mostly with the reading of the major nineteenth-century Russian, French, and English novelists.
In 1938 she moved to Salisbury, took an office job, and began writing. A year later, she married Frank Wisdom. The marriage, which produced a son and a daughter, ended in divorce in 1943. In 1945 she married Gottfried Lessing. That marriage also ended in divorce, in 1949, after producing one son.
In 1949 Lessing left Southern Rhodesia for England with her youngest son and the manuscript of her first book, The Grass Is Singing, in hand. The book, a chronicle of life in Africa which took its title from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," was published the following year (1950) and was immediately well received.
After her arrival in England Lessing wrote a great number of short stories, books, plays, poems, essays, and reviews. Her most significant works include the short story collections This Was The Old Chief's Country (1951), A Man and Two Women (1963), and African Stories (1957) and the novels that make up the "Children of Violence" series--Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969)--as well as the novels Five (1953), Retreat to Innocence (1956), The Golden Notebook (1962), and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971).
While Lessing was also prolific in producing non-fiction, it is in her fiction that she made her strongest statements. Her writing borders on the autobiographical. Her fictional accounts of Africa and England bear a strong resemblance to her own life, and the heroines of her novels greatly resemble each other and their creator. Her books all deal with the same themes: the problem of racism in British colonial Africa and the place of women in a male-dominated world and their escape from the social and sexual repression of that world. These are the themes of Lessing's life as well as her work.
http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9433450
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=77Ip47PpiVs&feature=related
In addition to her writing, Dorothy Parker was a noted member of the New York literary scene in 1920s. She formed a group called the Algonquin Round Table with writer Robert Benchley and playwright Robert Sherwood. This artistic crowd also included such members as The New Yorker founder Harold Ross, comedian Harpo Marx, and playwright Edna Ferber among others. The group took its name from its hangout—the Algonquin Hotel, but also also known as the Vicious Circle for the number of cutting remarks made by its members and their habit of engaging in sharp-tongued banter.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Dorothy Parker spent much of her time in Hollywood, California. She wrote screenplays with her second husband Alan Campbell, including the 1937 adaptation of A Star Is Born and the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock film Saboteur. In her personal life, she had become politically active, supporting such causes as the fight for civil rights. She also was involved with the Communist Party in the 1930s. It was this association that led to her being blacklisted in Hollywood.
While her opportunities in Hollywood may have dried up, Dorothy Parker was still a well-regarded writer and poet. She even went on to write a play entitled Ladies of the Corridor in 1953. Parker returned to New York City in 1963, spending her last few years in fragile condition. She died on June 7, 1967.
TED CHIANG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/26/podcast-of-ted-chian.html
Although not a prolific author, having published only 10 short stories as of 2008, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for Tower of Babylon (1990), the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Story of Your Life (1998), a Sidewise Award for Seventy-Two Letters (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette Hell Is the Absence of God (2002) -- and most recently, a Nebula Award for his novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (2007).
Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story Liking What You See: A Documentary in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted .
In a recent interview (May 19, 2008) , Chiang mentioned that he is currently writing a couple of new stories, with one being a novella that explores the theme of artificial intelligence.
ALICE MUNROhttp://members.aol.com/MunroAlice/bio.htm
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=rkHtjACeaok
Nearly all of Alice Munro’s fiction is set in southwestern Ontario, but her reputation as a brilliant short-story writer goes far beyond the borders of her native Canada. Her accessible, moving stories offer immediate pleasures while simultaneously exploring human complexities in what appear to be effortless anecdotal re-creations of everyday life. In one novel and eight collections of stories she has established herself as a major voice among fiction writers.
Munro--the oldest of three siblings--was born Alice Laidlaw into a family of fox and poultry farmers on July 10, 1931, in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario. Her father was named Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, who was a schoolteacher, was Anne Clarke Laidlaw (nee Chamney). She began writing in her teens. She published her first story in 1950 while a student at Western Ontario University. While at school, she also worked as waitress, tobacco picker and a library clerk. But she left school to marry James Munro and moved to British Columbia, where she had three children and helped her husband establish a bookstore. This marriage broke up in 1972 when she returned to Ontario, and she remarried (to Gerald Fremlin, a geographer) in 1976. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was not published until 1968, but it was highly acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize. This success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories that was published as a novel and won the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award.
Her remaining books are all short story collections, two of which also won the Governor General’s Award in 1978 and 1986: Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974); Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, titled The Beggar Maid in English and American editions); The Moons of Jupiter (1982); The Progress of Love (1986); Friend of My Youth (1990); Open Secrets (1994); Selected Stories (1996); The Love of a Good Woman (1998); Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001); Vintage Munro (2004); and Runaway (2004). In addition, her stories are regularly printed in such publications as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Mademoiselle, and The Paris Review.
