Doris May Lessing CH (ne Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and

short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (195269), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (19791983). Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In doing so the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".[1] Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2][3][4] In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[5] Lessing was born in Iran, then known as Persia, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (ne McVeagh), who were both English and of British nationality.[6] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation.[7][8] Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran, in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was there that Doris was born in 1919.[9][10] The family then moved to the then British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize, among other plants, when her father purchased around one thousand acres of bush. Lessing's mother attempted to lead an Edwardian lifestyle amidst the rough environment, which would have been easy had the family been wealthy; in reality, such a lifestyle was not feasible. The farm failed to deliver any monetary value in return .[11] Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in Salisbury (now Harare).[12] She left school at the age of 14, and was self-educated from there on; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her, on politics and sociology [8] and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943.[8] Following her first divorce, Lessing's interest was drawn to the popular community of the Left Book Club, a communist book club which she had joined the year before.[11][13] It was here that she met her future second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group, and had a child together (Peter), before the marriage failed and ended in divorce in 1949. After these two failed marriages, she has not been married since. Later on Gottfried Lessing became the East German ambassador to Uganda, and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.[8] When she fled to London to pursue her writing career and communist beliefs, she left two toddlers with their father in South Africa (another, from her second marriage, went with her). She later said that at the time she thought she had no choice: "For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an

intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother."[14] Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE (7 September 1932 27 November 2000) was an English author and academic. Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a railwayman. His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School, where he remained until 1950. He read English at University College, Leicester and gained a first-class degree in English in 1953. He continued his studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955. Between 1955 and 1958 Bradbury moved between teaching posts with the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the US. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation; such was his heart condition that he was not expected to live beyond middle age. In 1959, while in hospital, Bradbury completed his first novel, Eating People is Wrong. He married Elizabeth Salt and they had two sons. He took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, attended by both Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Bradbury published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.[1] Malcolm Bradbury died at Priscilla Bacon Lodge, Colman Hospital, Norwich, attended by his wife and their two sons, Matthew and Dominic. He was buried on 4 December 2000 in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church, Tasburgh, a village near Norwich where the Bradburys owned a second home. Though he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England, and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's famous poem "Church Going". Eating People is Wrong (1959) Writers and Critics: Evelyn Waugh (Oliver and Boyd, 1964) Stepping Westward (1965) The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971) Possibilities (1973) The History Man (1975) Who Do You Think You Are? (1976) a collection of short stories

All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go (1982) The After Dinner Game (1982) Rates of Exchange (1983) The Modern American Novel (1983) Why Come to Slaka? (1986) Cuts (1987) a Hutchinson Novella Mensonge (1987) My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism's Hidden Hero (1987) No Not Bloomsbury (1987) Unsent Letters (1988) Why Come to Slaka? (1991) Doctor Criminale (1992) The Modern British Novel (1993) Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (1995) To the Hermitage (2000) Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.[1] Early years [edit] Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet.[2][3] He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at thirteen to Gresham's School in Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but was unhappy there. On the death of his mother he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of Schools."[4] Spender subsequently went up to University College, Oxford where, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow. He left Oxford without taking a degree and subsequently lived for periods of time in Germany. He said at various times throughout his life that he never passed an exam, ever. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later come to know W. B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf. His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s. Poetry collections [edit]

Nine Experiments (1928, privately printed) Twenty Poems (1930)

Poems (1933; 2nd edition 1934) Vienna (1934) The Still Centre (1939) Ruins and Visions (1942) Spiritual Exercises (1943, privately printed) Poems of Dedication (1947) The Edge of Being (1949) Collected Poems, 19281953 (1955) Selected Poems (1965) The Express (1966) The Generous Days (1971) Selected Poems (1974) Recent Poems (1978) Collected Poems 19281985 (1986) Dolphins (1994) New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Brett, (2004) An Elementary Classroom Drama [edit] Trial of a Judge (1938) Rasputin's End (opera libretto, music by Nicolas Nabokov, 1958) The Oedipus Trilogy (1985) Novels and short story collections [edit] The Burning Cactus (1936, stories) The Backward Son (1940) Engaged in Writing (1958) The Temple (written 1928; published 1988) Criticism, travel books and essays [edit] The Destructive Element (1935) Forward from Liberalism (1937) Life and the Poet (1942) Citizens in War and After (1945) European Witness (1946) Poetry Since 1939 (1946) The God That Failed (1949, with others, ex-Communists' testimonies) Learning Laughter (1952) The Creative Element (1953) The Making of a Poem (1955) The Struggle of the Modern (1963) The Year of the Young Rebels (1969) Love-Hate Relations (1974) Eliot (1975; Fontana Modern Masters) W. H. Auden: A Tribute (edited by Spender, 1975) The Thirties and After (1978) China Diary (with David Hockney, 1982) Memoir [edit]

World Within World (1951) Letters and journals [edit] Letters to Christopher: Stephen Spender's Letters to Christopher Isherwood (1980) Journals, 19391983 (1985) New Selected Journals, 19391995 (2012) David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le Carr (pron.: /l kre/), is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, when he began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and remains one of his bestknown works. Following the novel's success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le Carr has since established himself as an important writer of espionage fiction. In 1990, he received the Helmerich Award which is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.[1] In 2008, The Times ranked Le Carr 22nd on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2] In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute. Novels [edit] Call for the Dead (1961) A Murder of Quality (1962) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) (Edgar Award 1965, Best Novel) The Looking Glass War (1965) A Small Town in Germany (1968) The Nave and Sentimental Lover (1971) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Non-fiction [edit]

The Good Soldier (1991) collected in Granta 35: The Unbearable Peace The United States Has Gone Mad (2003) collected in Not One More Death (2006) Short stories [edit] Dare I Weep, Dare I Mourn? (1967) published in the Saturday Evening Post 28 January 1967. What Ritual is Being Observed Tonight? (1968) published in the Saturday Evening Post 2 November 1968. The Writer and The Horse (1968) published in The Savile Club Centenary Magazine and later The Argosy (& The Saturday Review under the title A Writer and A Gentleman.) The King Who Never Spoke (2009) published in Ox-Tales: Fire 2 July 2009. Omnibus [edit] The Incongruous Spy (1964) (containing Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality) The Quest for Karla (1982) (containing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People) (republished in 1995 as Smiley versus Karla in the UK; and John Le Carr: Three Complete Novels in the U.S.) Screenplays [edit]

End of the Line (1970) broadcast 29 June 1970 A Murder of Quality (1991) The Tailor of Panama (2001) with John Boorman and Andrew Davies Wystan Hugh Auden (pron.: /wstn hju dn/;[1] 21 February 1907 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,[2][3] born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[4] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[5][6] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.[7] He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Muse des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media.[4] Books [edit]

Poems (London, 1930; second edn., seven poems substituted, London, 1933; includes poems and Paid on Both Sides: A Charade[44]) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood). The Orators: An English Study (London, 1932, verse and prose; slightly revised edn., London, 1934; revised edn. with new preface, London, 1966; New York 1967) (dedicated to Stephen Spender). The Dance of Death (London, 1933, play)[44] (dedicated to Robert Medley and Rupert Doone). Poems (New York, 1934; contains Poems [1933 edition], The Orators [1932 edition], and The Dance of Death). The Dog Beneath the Skin (London, New York, 1935; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to Robert Moody). The Ascent of F6 (London, 1936; 2nd edn., 1937; New York, 1937; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to John Bicknell Auden). Look, Stranger! (London, 1936, poems; US edn., On This Island, New York, 1937) (dedicated to Erika Mann)

Letters from Iceland (London, New York, 1937; verse and prose, with Louis MacNeice)[45] (dedicated to George Augustus Auden). On the Frontier (London, 1938; New York 1939; play, with Christopher Isherwood)[44] (dedicated to Benjamin Britten). Journey to a War (London, New York, 1939; verse and prose, with Christopher Isherwood)[45] (dedicated to E. M. Forster). Another Time (London, New York 1940; poetry) (dedicated to Chester Kallman). The Double Man (New York, 1941, poems; UK edn., New Year Letter, London, 1941) (Dedicated to Elizabeth Mayer). For the Time Being (New York, 1944; London, 1945; two long poems: "The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest", dedicated to James and Tania Stern, and "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio", in memoriam Constance Rosalie Auden [Auden's mother]). The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York, 1945; includes new poems) (dedicated to Christopher Isherwood and Chester Kallman). The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York, 1947; London, 1948; verse; won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) (dedicated to John Betjeman). Film scripts and opera libretti [edit] Coal Face (1935, closing chorus for GPO Film Unit documentary).[44] Night Mail (1936, narrative for GPO Film Unit documentary, not published separately except as a program note).[44] Paul Bunyan (1941, libretto for operetta by Benjamin Britten; not published until 1976).[47] The Rake's Progress (1951, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Igor Stravinsky).[47] Elegy for Young Lovers (1956, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze).[47] The Bassarids (1961, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Hans Werner Henze based on The Bacchae of Euripides).[47] Runner (1962, documentary film narrative for National Film Board of Canada) Love's Labour's Lost (1973, with Chester Kallman, libretto for an opera by Nicolas Nabokov, based on Shakespeare's play).[47] Musical collaborations [edit] Our Hunting Fathers (1936, song cycle written for Benjamin Britten) An Evening of Elizabethan Verse and its Music (1954 recording with the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director Noah Greenberg; Auden spoke the verse texts) The Play of Daniel (1958, verse narration for a production by the New York Pro Musica Antiqua, director Noah Greenberg)