BIOGRAPHY

Foreign Literature: Biography of Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, essayist,

memoirist, and screenwriter. His best-known novels are Money(1984)
and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize
twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003
for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the
Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In
2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since
1945.

Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society,

whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature;
he has been portrayed as a master of what The New York Times called "the
new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov,
and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself has
gone on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
including Will Self and Zadie Smith.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Martin Amis

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and

essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of
careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute
inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness.
Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history,
politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about
libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created
the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book
Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold:
Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann
Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. Baker has also written about and
edited Wikipedia. A pacifist, he has also written about the buildup
to World War II.

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City and spent much of his youth in the Rochester, New
York, area. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in English
from Haverford College.

Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media.
He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for
sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and
newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison
Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.

In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old
newspapers from destruction by libraries. In 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain
librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense
of both the public and historical preservation.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Max Barry

Max Barry (born 18 March 1973) is an Australian author. He also

maintains a blog on various topics, including politics. When he
published his first novel, Syrup, he spelled his name "Maxx", but
subsequently has used "Max".

Barry is also the creator of NationStates, a game created to help

advertise Jennifer Government that eventually evolved into its
own online community. He is the owner of the website 'Tales of
Corporate Oppression'. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and
daughters and worked as a marketer for Hewlett-Packard before
he became a novelist. NationStates is the most popular online
nation simulation game created to date.

In early 2004 Barry converted his web site to a blog and began regularly posting to it. In the November
2004 issue of the magazine Fast Company the novel Company was ranked at number 8 on a list of the top
100 "people, ideas, and trends that will change how we work and live in 2005." [3] Barry wrote the
screenplay for Syrup, which was released in theatres on June 7, 2013. Universal Pictures has acquired
screen rights to Company, which will be adapted by Steve Pink. Jennifer Government was optioned
by Steven Soderberghand George Clooney's now defunct Section Eight Productions. His book, Machine
Man, initially was an online serial, but has since been updated and published in 2011 by Vintage Books.
The film rights have been picked up by Mandalay Pictures.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Peter Cameron

Peter Cameron (born November 29, 1959 in Pompton Plains, New

Jersey) is an American novelist and writer living in New York City and
Vermont. He is best known for his novels Andorra, The
Weekend, The City of Your Final Destination, Someday This Pain Will
Be Useful to You, and Coral Glynn.

Cameron grew up in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock

Township, New Jersey, and in London, England. He spent two years
attending the progressive American School in London, where he
discovered the joys of reading, and began writing stories, poems, and
plays. Cameron graduated from Hamilton College in New York State
in 1982 with a B.A. in English literature.

He sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1983, and published ten more stories in that magazine
during the next few years. This exposure facilitated the publication of his first book, a collection of stories
titled One Way or Another, published by Harper & Row in 1986. One Way or Another was awarded a
special citation by the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Book of Fiction. In 1988, Cameron was hired
by Adam Moss to write a serial novel for the just-launched magazine, 7 Days. This serial, which was written
and published a chapter a week, became Leap Year, a comic novel of life and love in New York City in the
twilight of the 1980s. It was published in 1989 by Harper & Row, which also published a second collection
of stories, Far-flung, in 1991.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Frank Delaney

Frank Delaney (24 October 1942 – 21 February 2017) was an Irish

novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He was the author of the New
York Times best-seller Ireland, the non-fiction book Simple
Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea, and many other works
of fiction, non-fiction and collections. He was born in Tipperary,
Ireland.

Delaney's first book, James Joyce's Odyssey (1981), was well

received and became a best-seller in the UK and Ireland. He wrote
and presented the six-part documentary series The Celts (1987) for
the BBC, and wrote the accompanying book. He subsequently
wrote five books of non-fiction (including Simple Courage), ten
novels (including Ireland, Venetia Kelly's Traveling
Show and Tipperary), one novella, and a number of short stories.
He also edited many compilations of essays and poetry.

Delaney wrote the screenplay for an adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2002), which starred Martin
Clunes and was shown on ITV in Britain, and in the Masterpiece Theatre series in the United States. His
articles were published by newspapers in United States, the UK and Ireland, including on the Op-ed pages
of The New York Times. He was a frequent public speaker, and was a contributor and guest on National
Public Radio (NPR) programmes.

On Bloomsday 2010, Delaney launched Re:Joyce, a series of short weekly podcasts that go page-by-page
through James Joyce's Ulysses, discussing its allusions, historical context and references. These are
housed on www.frankdelaney.com.

Delaney lived in Litchfield County, Connecticut,[4] with his wife, Diane Meier.[8]
Foreign Literature: Biography of Thomas Clancy Jr.

6. Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947 – October 1, 2013) was an
American novelist best known for his technically
detailed espionageand military-science storylines set during and after
the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels were bestsellers, and more
than 100 million copies of his books are in print.[1] His name was also
used on movie scripts written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on
military subjects, and video games. He was a part-owner of
the Baltimore Orioles and vice-chairman of their community activities
and public affairs committees.

Clancy's literary career began in 1984 when he sold The Hunt for Red
October for $5,000. His works The Hunt for Red
October(1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present
Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) have been turned into commercially successful films.
Actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski have played Clancy's most
famous fictional character, Jack Ryan. Another well-known character of his, John Clark, has been portrayed
by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber. Tom Clancy's works also inspired games such as the Ghost
Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell series. Clancy died on October 1, 2013. Since his death, his Jack
Ryan series has been continued by his family estate through a series of authors.

Clancy was born on April 12, 1947, at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in
the Northwood neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. He was the second of three children to Thomas
Clancy, who worked for the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Clancy, who worked in a store's
credit department. His mother worked to send him to the private Roman Catholic secondary school taught
by the Jesuit religious order (Society of Jesus), Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, the
suburban county seat of Baltimore County, just north of the city, from which he graduated in 1965.

He then attended the associated Loyola College (now Loyola University Maryland) in Baltimore, graduating
in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. While at Loyola University, he was president of the
chess club. He joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps; however, he was ineligible to serve due
to his myopia (nearsightedness), which required him to wear thick eyeglasses. After graduating, he worked
for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1973, he joined the O. F. Bowen Agency, a small
insurance agency based in Owings, Maryland, founded by his wife's grandfather. In 1980, he purchased
the insurance agency from his wife's grandmother and wrote novels in his spare time. While working at the
insurance agency, he wrote his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984).
Foreign Literature: Biography of Tan Twan Eng

Tan Twan Eng is a Malaysian novelist born in Penang in 1972. Tan

studied law at the University of London, and later worked as an
advocate and solicitor in one of Kuala Lumpur's law firms before
becoming a full-time writer. He has a first-dan ranking in aikido and
lives in Malaysia.

His first novel, The Gift of Rain, published in 2007, was long-listed for
the Man Booker Prize. It is set in Penang before and during
the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II. The Gift of
Rain has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Romanian,
Czech, Serbian, French, Russian and Hungarian.

His second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, was published in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize 2012 and won the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.[6]

Tan has spoken at literary festivals, including the Singapore Writers Festival, the Ubud Writers' Festival
in Bali, the Asia Man Booker Festival in Hong Kong, the Shanghai International Literary Festival, the Perth
Writers Festival, the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia, and the Franschhoek Literary Festival in
South Africa.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw (born 30 July 1962) is an English poet and novelist.

She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry
has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward
Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. Her 2014 Costa Poetry Award was
for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw
Currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal
Holloway, University of London.

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London into a medical and scientific family,
and is one of two sisters and two brothers. When she was aged 11 the family moved from London to
an Essex village, where they lived for seven years. This period Greenlaw has described as "an interim
time", with "memories of time being arrested, nothing much happening."

She went on to read modern arts at Kingston Polytechnic, studied at the London College of Printing, and
has an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute. She has been employed as an editor at Imperial
College of Science and Technology (1985–86) and with the publishers Allison and Busby (1986–87), and
subsequently with Earthscan (1988–90). She also worked as an arts administrator for Southbank
Centre (1990–91) and the London Arts Board (1991–94).

Her career as a freelance artist, critic and radio broadcaster began in 1994. She became the first artist-in-
residence at the Science Museum (1994–95), and has since held residences at the Royal Festival Hall, at a
solicitors' firm in London (1997–98), and at the Royal Society of Medicine (2004). In 2013 she was awarded
an Engagement Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust.

Her sound work Audio Obscura, was commissioned from her in 2011 by Artangel and Manchester
International Festival, and took place at Manchester's Piccadilly Station in July 2011 and at London's St
Pancras International Station in September and October 2011. Audio Obscura won the 2011 Ted Hughes
Award for New Work in Poetry, the judges describing it as "groundbreaking".

Greenlaw has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She served as professor of creative
writing at the University of East Anglia from 2007 to 2013, and as a visiting professor at King's College
London (2015–16) and at Freie Universität Berlin (2017). She currently holds the post of Professor of
Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.

After judging the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize, she chaired in 2014 the judging panel for the
inaugural Folio Prize.She is a member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Chair
of the Poetry Society.

Greenlaw has lived in London for most of her life.

Foreign Literature: Biography of Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon (born 28 October 1962) is an English novelist, best

known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).
He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature
Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his
work.

Haddon was born on 28 October 1962 to Janella Murphy

in Northampton, England. He was educated at Uppingham
School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English. In
1984, he completed an MSc in English Literature at the University of
Edinburgh.

In 1987, Haddon wrote his first children's book, Gilbert’s Gobstopper. This was followed by many other
children's books, which were often self-illustrated.

Haddon is also known for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars,
was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television
adaptation of Raymond Briggs's story Fungus the Bogeyman, screened on BBC1 in 2004. In 2007 he wrote
the BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain.

In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award—in the Novels rather than Children's Books
category—for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He also won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize in the Best First Book category, as The Curious Incident was considered his first written for adults; yet
he also won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime award judged by a panel of
children's writers. It was also long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

The Curious Incident is written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome,
Christopher John Francis Boone. In an interview at Powells.com, Haddon claimed that this was the first
book that he wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested
marketing it to both adult and child audiences (it has been very successful with adults and children
alike). His second adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006.

His short story "The Pier Falls" was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story
Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Lily King

Lily King (born 1963) is an American novelist. King grew up in

Massachusetts and received a B.A. in English literature from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in creative
writing from Syracuse University. She has taught English and creative
writing at several universities and high schools.

King’s first novel, The Pleasing Hour (1999), won the Barnes and Noble
Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an
alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English
Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago
Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction
Award. Her third novel, Father of the Rain (2010), was a New York Times Editors Choice, a Publishers
Weekly Best Novel of the Year, and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and the Maine
Fiction Award.

King's fourth novel, Euphoria (2014), was inspired by events in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead. It
won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the 2014 New England Book Award for Fiction, and was a
finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award. Euphoria was listed among The New York
Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2014, TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, and the Amazon Best
Books of 2014.

King is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her short fiction has appeared in
literary magazines, including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in anthologies.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn (born August 3, 1962) is an

American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of
eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into
a film of the same name starring George Clooney.

Kirn was born in Akron, Ohio but grew up in Marine on St. Croix,
Minnesota. After high school, he attended Macalester College for
one year before transferring to Princeton University. Kirn's family
joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when he
was twelve, but Kirn is no longer affiliated with the church. In
1995, Kirn married Maggie McGuane, daughter of actress Margot
Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane. Kirn was 32 at the time;
McGuane was 19. The couple had two children but have since
divorced. Kirn is now married to magazine writer Amanda Fortini.
The two split their time between Livingston, Montana and Los Angeles, California.

As a writer, he has published a collection of short stories and several novels, including Thumbsucker, which
was made into a 2005 film featuring Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn; Up in the Air, which was made into
a 2009 film directed by Jason Reitman; and Mission to America. The film adaptation of Up In The Air, which
starred George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, was a commercial success and went on to receive critical
acclaim as well as numerous nominations and awards. In 2005, he took over blogger Andrew Sullivan's
publication for a few weeks while Sullivan was on vacation. He has also written The Unbinding, an Internet-
only novel that was published in Slatemagazine. His most recent work, Blood Will Out, is a personalized
account of his relationship with the convicted murderer and imposter Clark Rockefeller.

He has also reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book
Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has
received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles
of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.

In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare
Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. In 1983, he graduated from Princeton
University with a B.A. in English. Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English
Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.

12.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Dame Hilary Mantel

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE, FRSL (/mænˈtɛl/ man-

TEL; née Thompson; born 6 July 1952) is an English writer whose
[2]

work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.

She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first for the 2009
novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to
power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second for the 2012
novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second instalment of the Cromwell
trilogy.

Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice, following in
the footsteps of J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey and J. G. Farrell (who
posthumously won the Lost Man Booker Prize). The third instalment to the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light,
is in progress.

Hilary Mary Thompson was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and raised in the mill
village of Hadfield where she attended St Charles Roman Catholic primary school. Her parents, Margaret
(née Foster) and Henry Thompson, both of Irish descent, were also born in England. Her parents separated
and she did not see her father after the age of eleven. The family, without her father but with Jack Mantel
(1932–1995) who by now had moved in with them, relocated to Romiley, Cheshire, and Jack became her
unofficial stepfather. She took her de facto stepfather's surname legally.

She has explored her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, in her 2003 memoir, Giving
Up the Ghost. Although she lost her religious faith at age 12, she says it left a permanent mark on her:
After university, Mantel worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital and then as a sales
assistant in a department store.

In 1972, she married Gerald McEwen, a geologist. In 1974, she began writing a novel about the French
Revolution, which was later published as A Place of Greater Safety. In 1977, Mantel moved
to Botswana with her husband where they lived for the next five years. Later, they spent four years
in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She published a memoir of this period in the London Review of Books. She later
said that leaving Jeddah felt like "the happiest day of [her] life".

McEwen gave up geology to manage his wife's business. They divorced, but remarried a couple of years
later.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Richard Riordan Jr.

13. Richard Russell Riordan Jr. (/ˈraɪərdən/; born June 5, 1964) is an

American author. He is known for writing the Percy Jackson & the
Olympians series, about a twelve-year-old boy who discovers he is a son
of Poseidon. His books have been translated into 42 languages and sold
more than 30 million copies in the US. 20th Century Fox has adapted the
first two books of his Percy Jackson series as part of a series of films. His
books have spawned related media, such as graphic novels and short
story collections.

Riordan's first full-length novel was Big Red Tequila, which became the
first book in the Tres Navarre series. His big breakthrough was The Lightning Thief (2005), the first novel in
the five-volume Percy Jackson series, which placed a group of adolescents in a Greco-Roman
mythological setting.

Since then, Riordan has written The Kane Chronicles trilogy and The Heroes of Olympus series. The Kane
Chronicles (2010-2012) focused on Egyptian mythology; The Heroes of Olympus was the sequel to the
Percy Jackson series. Riordan also helped Scholastic Press develop The 39 Clues series and its spinoffs,
and penned its first book, The Maze of Bones (2008). His most recent publications are three books in
the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, based on Norse mythology. The first book of his The
Trials of Apollo series based on Greek mythology, The Hidden Oracle, was released in May 2016.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Carol Ann Shields

14. Carol Ann Shields, CC OM FRSC (June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an
American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for
her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction as well as the Governor General's Awardin Canada.

Shields was born Carol Ann Warner in Oak Park, Illinois.[1] She studied
at Hanover College Indiana, where she became a member of the Alpha Delta
Pi sorority. A United Nations scholarship encouraged Shields to spend a junior
year abroad 1955–1956 at the University of Exeter in England. Later, Shields
did post-graduate work at the University of Ottawa, where she received
an MA in 1975.

In 1955, while on British Council sponsored study week in Scotland, she met a Canadian engineering
student, Donald Hugh Shields. The couple married in 1957 and moved to Canada, where they had a son
and four daughters. Shields later became a Canadian citizen. Shields died in 2003 of breast cancer at age
68 in Victoria.

Following her death, six of her short stories were adapted by Shaftesbury Films into the dramatic anthology
series The Shields Stories. Her earlier short story collections were republished as Collected Stories of
Carol Shields in 2005. Films based on Carol Shields's novels include "Swann" (1996) and "The Republic of
Love" (2003). Her final novel, Unless, was adapted as a play in 2016 by Alan Gilsenan.

Shields' eldest daughter, Anne Giardini, is also a writer. Giardini has contributed to the National Post as a
columnist, and has published her first novel, The Sad Truth About Happiness. Anne's second novel, Advice
for Italian Boys, was published in 2009. Giardini and her son, Nicholas, edited a book of Shields' thoughts
and advice on writing, Startle and Illuminate, published in 2016. Shields' youngest daughter, Sara Cassidy,
has published young adult novels including Slick (2010) and Windfall (2011).
Foreign Literature: Biography of Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer (born May 28, 1959) is an American novelist, known

for The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Uncoupling, The Interestings,
and The Female Persuasion. She works as an instructor in the MFA
program at Stony Brook Southampton. Wolitzer was born in Brooklyn and
raised in Syosset, New York, the daughter of novelist Hilma Wolitzer (née
Liebman) and psychologist Morton Wolitzer.

She was raised Jewish. Wolitzer studied creative writing at Smith

College and graduated from Brown Universityin 1981. She wrote her first
novel, Sleepwalking, a story of three college girls obsessed with poetry
and death, while still an undergraduate; it was published in 1982. Her
following books include Hidden Pictures (1986), This Is Your
Life (1988), Surrender, Dorothy (1998), The Wife (2003), The Position (2005), The Ten-Year
Nap (2008), The Uncoupling (2011), and The Interestings (2013). Her short story "Tea at the House" was
featured in 1998's Best American Short Stories collection. Her novel for younger readers, The Fingertips of
Duncan Dorfman, was published in 2011.

She also co-authored, with Jesse Green, a book of cryptic crosswords: Nutcrackers: Devilishly Addictive
Mind Twisters for the Insatiably Verbivorous (1991), and has written about the relative difficulty women
writers face in gaining critical acclaim.

She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, Skidmore College, and, most
recently, was a guest artist at Princeton University. Over the past decade she has also taught at both Stony
Brook Southampton's MFA in Creative Writing program and the Southampton Writers Conference and the
Florence Writers Workshop. Three films have been based on her work; This Is My Life, scripted and
directed by Nora Ephron, the 2006 made-for-television movie, Surrender, Dorothy, and the 2017
drama The Wife, starring Glenn Close.

The Uncoupling was the subject of the first coast-to-coast virtual book club discussion, via Skype. As of
2018, Wolitzer resides in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with her husband, science writer Richard
Panek.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Richard Warren

16. Richard Duane Warren (born January 28, 1954) is an

American evangelical Christian pastor and author. He is the founder and
senior pastor of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch in Lake
Forest, California that is the sixth-largest megachurch in the United States
(including multi-site churches). He is also a bestselling author of many
Christian books, including his guide to church ministry and evangelism, The
Purpose Driven Church, which has spawned a series of conferences on
Christian ministry and evangelism. He is perhaps best known for the
subsequent book The Purpose Driven Life which has sold more than 30
million copies, making Warren a New York Times bestselling author.

Warren holds conservative theological views and traditional evangelical views on social issues such as
abortion, same-sex marriage, abstinence-only education over the use of condoms to prevent HIV/AIDS,
and embryonic stem-cell research.

During the 2008 United States presidential election, Warren hosted the Civil Forum on the Presidency at
his church with both presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. Obama later sparked
controversy when he asked Warren to give the invocation at the presidential inauguration in January 2009.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Mark Dunn

Mark Dunn (born July 12, 1956, Memphis, Tennessee) is an American author
and playwright. He studied film at Memphis State University (now
the University of Memphis) followed by post-graduate work in screenwriting at
the University of Texas at Austin moving to New York in 1987 where he
worked in the New York Public Library whilst writing plays in his free time.

Among the thirty plays Dunn has written (as of 2015), Belles and Five Tellers
Dancing in the Rain have been produced over one hundred and fifty times.
Dunn is playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and
the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

In 1998 Dunn sued the writers, distributors and producers of The Truman Show, claiming that the story was
based on a play he had written and performed Off-Broadway in 1992, Frank's Life.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Julia Glass

Julia Glass (born March 23, 1956) is an American novelist. Her debut
novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002.

Glass followed Three Junes with a second novel, The Whole World Over, in
2006, set in the same Bank Street–Greenwich Villageuniverse, with three
interwoven stories featuring several characters from Three Junes. Her third
novel, I See You Everywhere, was published in 2008; her fourth, The
Widower's Tale, in 2010; and her fifth, And the Dark Sacred Night, in 2014.

Glass was born in Boston, grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts and Lincoln, Massachusetts, and
attended Concord Academy. She graduated from Yale in 1978. Intending to become a painter, she moved
to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting
herself as a freelance editor and copy editor, including several years in the copy department
of Cosmopolitan magazine. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her partner, the photographer
Dennis Cowley, and their two children, and works as a freelance journalist and editor. She is a previous
winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Thomas Keneally

Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is a

prolific[1] Australian novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is best known
for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982
which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust
survivor. The book would later be adapted to Steven
Spielberg's Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best
Picture.

Kenneally's first story was published in the Bulletin magazine in 1962

under the pseudonym Bernard Coyle. By February 2014, he had
written over 50 books, including 30 novels. He is particularly famed for his Schindler's Ark (1982) (later
republished as Schindler's List), the first novel by an Australian to win the Booker Prize and is the basis of
the film Schindler's List. He had already been shortlisted for the Booker three times prior to that: 1972
for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1975 for Gossip from the Forest, and 1979 for Confederates.

Many of his novels are reworkings of historical material, although modern in their psychology and style.
Keneally has also acted in a handful of films. He had a small role in Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie
Blacksmith (1978) (based on his own novel) and played Father Marshall in the award-winning film The
Devil's Playground (1976), also by Schepisi.

In 1983, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).[7] He is an Australian Living Treasure.
Keneally was a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council from 1985 to 1988 and President of
the National Book Council from 1985 to 1989.

Keneally was a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he taught the graduate
fiction workshop for one quarter in 1985. From 1991 to 1995, he was a visiting professor in the writing
program at UCI.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Daphne Maynard

20. Daphne Joyce Maynard (born November 5, 1953) is an

American novelist and journalist. She began her career in journalism
in the 1970s, writing for several publications, most
notably Seventeen magazine and The New York Times. Maynard
contributed to Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines in the
1980s while also beginning a career as a novelist with the publication
of her first novel, Baby Love (1981). Her second novel, To Die
For (1992), drew from the Pamela Smart murder case and was
adapted into the 1995 film of the same name. Maynard received
significant media attention in 1998 with the publication of her
memoir At Home in the World, which deals with her affair with J. D.
Salinger.

Maynard has published novels in a wide range of literary genres,

including fiction, young adult fiction, and true crime. Her sixth novel, Labor Day (2009), was adapted into
the 2013 film of the same name, directed by Jason Reitman. Her most recent novels include The Good
Daughters (2010), After Her (2013) and Under the Influence (2016).
Foreign Literature: Biography of Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers (born July 11, 1980) is an American fiction writer, poet,
and Iraq War veteran.

Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a factory
worker and a postman, and enlisted in the U.S. Army at the age of
seventeen. He attended James River High School.

Six years later, in 2004, he served a one-year tour in Iraq as a machine

gunner assigned to an engineer unit. Powers served in Mosul and Tal
Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005. After his honorable discharge, Powers enrolled in Virginia
Commonwealth University, where he graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. He holds an
MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Jordan Peterson

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical

psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of
Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social,
and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology
of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and
improvement of personality and performance.

Peterson studied at the University of Alberta and McGill University. He

remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow from 1991 to 1993 before
moving to Harvard University, where he was an assistant and then an
associate professor in the psychology department. In 1998, he moved
back to Canada as a faculty member in the psychology department at
the University of Toronto, where, as of 2019, he is a full professor.

Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, published in 1999, examined several
academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation
of emotion, creation of meaning, and several other topics such as motivation for genocide. His second
book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released in January 2018.

In 2016 Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing political correctness and the Canadian
government's Bill C-16. The act added gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination, which
Peterson characterised as an introduction of compelled speechinto law. He subsequently received
significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism. Peterson is associated with the
"Intellectual Dark Web".
Foreign Literature: Biography of Jo Walton

Jo Walton (born December 1, 1964) is a Welsh-

Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She won the John W.
Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002 and the World Fantasy
award for her novel Tooth and Claw in 2004.

Her novel Ha'penny was a co-winner of the 2008 Prometheus Award. Her
novel Lifelode won the 2010 Mythopoeic Award.

Her novel Among Others won the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and
the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and is one of only seven novels to
have been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and World
Fantasy Award.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Martin Vargic

Martin Vargic is a Slovak artist and author, best known for his book
"Vargic's Miscellany of Curious Maps", and "Map of the Internet", that
went viral in late January 2014.

Vargic publishes all of his works (chiefly maps and charts) on his
website, halcyonmaps.com.

On 15 January 2014, Vargic published the "Map of the Internet"

on Deviantart.[5] It is a conceptual artwork that depicts the largest
websites and software companies as sovereign nations on a stylized
political map of the world, scaled according to their traffic and Alexa ratings. It was first featured in media
on 30 January 2014, after a design and technology blog Gizmodo wrote an article on the subject.

Following week, the map was featured on a wide variety of news sites and blogs in over 20 countries, most
notably on The Independent, Fox News, The Huffington Post and Business Insider.

In addition to the "Map of the Internet", Vargic has recently published a wide variety of other maps, notably
"The World - Climate Change", depicting the world after 260-ft sea level rise, the "Map of Stereotypes" and
a number of other maps and charts.

In September 2015, Vargic published his first book, Vargic's Miscellany of Curious Maps.
Foreign Literature: Biography of Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín (Irish pronunciation: born 30 May 1955) is an Irish

novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and
poet.

Tóibín is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the

Humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as
professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was
appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017.

Hailed as a champion of minorities as he collected the 2011 Irish

PEN Award, that same year he was named by The Observer one of
"Britain's Top 300 Intellectuals" despite being Irish.

Tóibín has said his writing comes out of silence. He does not favour story and does not view himself as
storyteller. He has said, "Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly."
Tóibín works in the most extreme, severe, austere conditions. He sits on a hard, uncomfortable chair which
causes him pain. When working on a first draft he covers only the right-hand side of the page; later he
carries out some rewriting on the left-hand side of the page. He keeps a word processor in another room on
which to transfer writing at a later time.