China

Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a cause of pride for a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic. National television broke into its newscast to announce the prize — exceptional for […]

The Cost of Hope: A Memoir by Amanda Bennett

The Cost of Hope: A Memoir Amanda Bennett Random House Publishing Group Original Edition (June 5, 2012) IBSN: 978-1-4000-6984-2 — ♦ — Amanda Bennett has lived a pretty big life so far – Harvard graduate, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, reporter for the The Wall Street Journal, editor of the Herald-Leader (Lexington, KY), […]

Birthdays

On this day, March 9, in 1892, the fascinating Vita Sackville-West was born in Kent, England. She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist who published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime, as well as 13 novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature, and was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate lesbian love affairs, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir
Harold Nicolson, created at their estate. She died at age 70, of stomach cancer.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.