I think if everyone describes their nations and writers it can make us have more knowledge about different nations...
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I think if everyone describes their nations and writers it can make us have more knowledge about different nations...
I'm an American, and Mark Twain, H. P. Lovecraft, and other writers were, or are, Americans
I'm Canadian and our big one is Margaret Atwood I suppose.
Italian, but Gabrielle D'Annunzio is one of my favorite Italian writers who outside of Italy seems entirely unknown.
P. K. Page for me, Canadian. Anne Hebert or perhaps Hubert Aquin for Quebec I suppose, though Emile Nelligan is the archetypal French Canadian bard.
American. Melville.
I'm English and I'm going for Virginia Woolf...among others of course.
I am from Iceland and I guess our most famous author is Halldór Laxness and maybe the sagas but they don't really have an author I guess, except one or two.
I am Caymanian and we have no known authors originally from here. Hhhmmm, I think I am the only one:willy_nilly:
Mexican.- my favorite mexican writer is Juan Rulfo, there are others like Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes
British and my favourite British literary figure is George Orwell
Bengal - Rabindranath Tagore
;) Technically, Bengal is not a nation. But it has its own language, and Tagore is also my favourite Indian writer. I would add Kalidas in addition if I was discussing the entirety of Indian literature.
I am from Austria and Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler were two great authors.
From India and my favorite Indian writers are Arundhati Roy and R.K. Narayan. Among authors writing in languages other than English Ghalib is my favorite.
Born in Argentina, but lived 3/4 of my life in this United States of America. Macedonio Fernandez, J.L. Borges, Julio Cortazar (terrible as a poet) and Roberto Arlt, some of the best Argentinean writers in my opinion. Arlt died too young, at 42 from Tuberculosis, my project Dostoievski. In the United States, Mark Twain, Faulkner, Thoreau, Thomas Jefferson, etc., etc. and etc.
What about Snorri Sturluson?Quote:
Originally Posted by Helga
I'm American, proud of it too. We have Stephen King and Orson Scott Card, two of my personal favorites.
Though, I love reading literature written by authors from different cultures and countries, interesting indeed.
I liked Card a little too until I started reading his non-fiction which is jingoist homophobia if I've ever seen it.Quote:
Originally Posted by QuentinL
I hear the politics make there way into some of his other books (I only read Ender's Game), which I guess is unfortunate, since in terms of craft he has some talent.
Card's a devout Mormon and it makes its way into a lot of his work, it is a bit unfortunate at times. Ender's Game is a great work of children's literature though.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
Edit: This review is worth a read to see just how far Card's work has fallen,
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2011summer/card.shtml
I'm from Belgium and we don't have to brag too much... but Charles de Coster is one (Uylenspieghel), Willem who wrote Reynaert, Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize for Lit for us and then there are Hendrik Conscience, Johan Daisne (one of the few magical realists), Willem Elsshot
I think that's about it apart from a few peasants' stories and mass 19th century bourgeois writings everyone has forgotten about...
I'm Australian - perhaps Bryce Courtenay (The Power of One), Thomas Keneally (Schindler's Ark), Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda)? I can't really think of any others!
David Malouf is my favourite Australian author, though.
You forgot to mention Georges Simenon who wrote getting on for 200 novels and also claimed to have slept with 10,000 women. Where on earth did he get the time for those novels?Quote:
Originally Posted by kiki1982
I'm British, so there's a lot of scope. However, Hilary Mantel most excellent writer of Wolf Hall, grew up in my town, and I went to school with Steven Hall who wrote The Raw Shark Texts and sometime writer of Dr. Who. Am I jealous of his success and talent...no of course not!
Hi. I'm new. I'm Bulgarian. I don't really like Bulgarian novels so much but we have some good poets. Most of them died young.
Here - the last poem of Nikola Vaptzarov.
The fight is hard and pitiless.
The fight is epic, as they say.
I fell. Another takes my place –
Why single out a name?
After the firing squad – the worms.
Thus does the simple logic go.
But in the storm, we’ll be with you,
My people, for we loved you so.
wow, thats quite a beautifull poem, thanks for introducing me to this poet. What do you think would be the best english translation of his works?Quote:
Originally Posted by makkesan
I am Swede and the greatest author here is probably August Strindberg, but global maybe Stieg Larsson now days.
I'll add three I recently read; Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner (American)
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Unfortunately, most of Bulgarian poets don't have good translations in English -not to mention whole books. Here I can offer another one from Vaptzarov. He was a communist in times when communism was not a dirty word.
History
History, will you mention us
In your faded scroll?
We worked in factories, offices –
Our names were not well known.
We worked in fields, smelled strongly
Of onion and sour bread.
Through thick moustaches angrily
We cursed the life we led.
Will you at least be grateful
We fattened you with news
And slaked your thirst so richly
With the blood of slaughtered crowds?
You’ll lose the human focus
To view the panorama,
And no one will remember
The simple human drama.
The poets will be distracted
With pamphlets, progress rates;
Our unrecorded suffering
Will roam alone in space.
Was it a life worth noting,
A life worth digging up?
Unearthed, it reeks of poison,
Tastes bitter in the cup.
We were born along the hedgerows,
In the shelter of stray thorns
Our mothers lay perspiring,
Their dry lips tightly drawn.
We died like flies in autumn.
The women mourned the dead,
Turned their lament to singing –
But only the wild grass heard.
We who survived our brothers,
Sweated from every pore,
Took any job that offered,
Toiled as the oxen do.
At home our fathers taught us:
‘So shall it always be.’
But we scowled back and spat on
Their fool’s philosophy.
We quit the table curtly,
Ran out of doors, and there
In the open felt the stirring
Of something bright and fair.
How anxiously we waited
In crowded-out cafés,
And turned in late at night
With the last communiqués!
How we were soothed by hoping! ...
But leaden skies pressed lower,
The scorching wind hissed viciously ...
Till we could stand no more!
Yet in your endless volumes
Beneath each letter and line
Out pain will leer forbiddingly
And raise a bitter cry.
For life, showing no mercy,
With heavy brutish paw
Battered our hungry faces.
That’s why our tongue is raw.
That’s why the poems I’m writing
In hours I steal from sleep
Have not the grace of perfume,
But brief and scowling beat.
For the hardship and affliction
We do not seek rewards,
Nor do we want our pictures
In the calendar of years.
Just tell our story simply
To those we shall not see,
Tell those who will replace us –
We fought courageously.
If I were a Persian/Iranian which I am not, Omar Khayam would be my top poet...and Mathematician, Astronomer and Philosopher too.
I am English-British. I guess the most obvious choice is Shakespeare. Among the arts this island has only really excelled in literature. In painting and music the continental Europeans have far more to boast about. There is Chaucer, Dickens, Shelley, Byron, Keats, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, D H Lawrence, John Milton, H G Wells, Dr Johnson, John Donne, Alexander Pope.
Two of my personal favourites are Evelyn Waugh and Philip Larkin
But there are plenty of non-English writers who mean a great deal to me: Herman Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Voltaire, Montaigne etc.
I am german. There are quite some authors both contemporary and past. Heinrich Böll, Bertold Brecht, Heinrich Kleist, Günther Grass, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, to name a few. Not so good with women – Julia Franck, Christa Wolf, Sibylle Lewitscharoff ...
No can match the Germans in classical music, of course. But Brits surely have several excellent composers - Vaughan Williams, Elgar...; and artists - Turner, Constable... And in modern popular music the Brits are well ahead of continental Europe (Beatles, Stones...)Quote:
Originally Posted by WICKES
Pakistan has produced some really great writers which makes it quite difficult to make a choice. Unfortunately many of them stand quite unknown to the world especially when it come to prose. Writers like Saadat Hassan manto, a short story writer basically and novelists like Altaf Fatima and Khadija Mastoor. And then there are wonderful poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz (a revolutionary writer) and Sahir Ludhianwi. But since I must narrow down to one writer, I think it will have to be the renowned national hero Allama Iqbal who played an important role as a revolutionary poet as well as an essay-writer, economist and political leader.
I am English-British, but I love Herman Hesse. I am trying to learn German so that I can read him in the original. I also loved Thomas Mann's Death In Venice.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lulim
I'm Scottish, so take your pick from the world's finest. :)
Regards
I'm Estonian. Our most noted prose writer is probably Anton Hansen Tammsaare - at least this is the official canon as taught in schools. His pentalogy "Truth and Justice" is rather good, I think. Karl Ristikivi, who emigrated to Sweden and writes about being a stranger (plus some very fine poetry), deserves to be mentioned, as does Jaan Kross, who died a few years ago but was before that considered a living classic. Andrus Kivirähk is very popular nowadays and has an excellent sense of humour, which, sadly, relies too much on Estonian tropes that wouldn't be understood outside of the country. As for poetry, there is Juhan Viiding/Jüri Üdi who is somewhat difficult to understand as his poetry is rather decentralized, full of paradox, irony, wordplay and sudden change of perspective. I should probably also mention Uku Masing, a polyglot who knew about 65 languages and translated from 20, for his metaphysical poetry and essays.
I'm Canadian and one of my nation's most esteemed authors is Alice Munro. Its kind of neat because she lived for years in my town and some of her short stories are set here.
I'm English and (today) I think the most English book is "Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame.
Greek :) The ancients are very known, as is Constantine Cavafy. But you could have a look at the penguin classics edition of Alexander Papadiamantis's "The murderess", which arguably is the best novel written in Greek ever.
Are you, as a modern Greek person, able to read Plato and Homer? As a modern Englishman Shakespeare's English can occasionally be difficult (400 years ago), Chaucer more so (600 years ago) and a poem like the battle of Maldon (roughly 1000 years ago)... incomprehensible. I have often wondered how a modern Greek finds The Odyssey, which is nearly 3000 years old. Is the language strange to you? Or can you read The Illiad and Odyssey with relative ease?Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyriakos