Encyclopedia of World Writers, 1800 to the Present

By Facts On File

In recent years, schools have started introducing more inclusive syllabi emphasizing the works and ideas of previously overlooked or underrepresented writers. Readers of all ages can now explore the rich contributions of writers from around the world. These writers have various backgrounds, and unlike most writers from the U.S. or the United Kingdom, information on them in English can be difficult to find.

Encyclopedia of World Writers: 1800 to the Present covers the most important writers outside of the U.S., Britain, and Ireland since 1800. More than 330 insightful, A-to-Z entries profile novelists, poets, dramatists, and short-story writers whose works are anthologized in textbooks or assigned in high school English classes. Entries range in length from 200 to 1,000 words each and include a biographical sketch, synopses of major works, and a brief bibliography. Dozens of entries are new to this edition and many existing entries have been updated and significantly expanded with new "Critical Analysis" sections.

Coverage includes:

• Chinua Achebe
• Margaret Atwood
• Roberto Bolaño
• Albert Camus
• Khalid Hosseini
• Victor Hugo
• Mohammad Iqbal
• Franz Kafka
• Stieg Larsson
• Mario Vargas Llosa
• Naghib Mahfouz
• Gabriel García Márquez
• Kenzaburo Oe
• Marcel Proust
• Leo Tolstoy
• Emile Zola
• and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facts On File
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646930036

Book preview

title

Encyclopedia of World Writers, 1800 to the Present

Copyright © 2020 by DWJ Books

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:

Facts On File

An imprint of Infobase

132 West 31st Street

New York NY 10001

ISBN 978-1-64693-003-6

You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web

at http://www.infobase.com

Contents

Entries

Abbas, Khawaja Ahmad

Abe Kōbō

Aboriginal literature and culture

Abrahams, Peter Henry

Achebe, Chinua

acmeism

Adiga, Aravind

Adonis

Agnon, Samuel Joseph

Aichinger, Ilse

Aidoo, Ama Ata

Akhmadulina, Izabella Akhatovna

Akhmatova, Anna

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Al-Jayyusi, Salma al-Khadra

Albahari, David

Alberti, Rafael

Aleichem, Shalom

Alencar, José Martiniano de

Allende, Isabel

Allfrey, Phyllis

Amado, Jorge

Amalrik, Andrey

Amichai, Yehuda

Anand, Mulk Raj

Andersen, Hans Christian

Andrić, Ivo

Anouilh, Jean

Anyidoho, Kofi

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Appelfeld, Aharon

Aragon, Louis

Arenas, Reinaldo

Arghezi, Tudor

Arnim, Bettina von

Arp, Hans

Arrabal, Fernando

Artaud, Antonin

Astley, Thea

Atwood, Margaret

Ausländer, Rose

Ba Jin

Bâ, Mariama

Babel, Isaac

Bachmann, Ingeborg

Balzac, Honoré de

Bama

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée

Baroja y Nessi, Pío

Bassani, Giorgio

Bataille, Georges

Baudelaire, Charles

Beauvoir, Simone de

Becher, Johannes Robert

Beckett, Samuel

Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo

Bei Dao

Bely, Andrey

Benn, Gottfried

Bennett, Louise

Bernhard, Thomas

Bhatt, Sujata

Bing Xin

Bitton, Erez

Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne

Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente

Bolaño, Roberto

Böll, Heinrich

Bonnefoy, Yves

Borges, Jorge Luis

Brasch, Charles

Braschi, Giannina

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau

Braun, Volker

Brecht, Bertolt

Breton, André

Breytenbach, Breyten

Brink, André

Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter

Broch, Hermann

Bryusov, Valery

Büchner, Georg

Bulgakov, Mikhail

Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich

Burkart, Erika

Busia, Abena

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo

Calvino, Italo

Camus, Albert

Canetti, Elias

Capécia, Mayotte

Carey, Peter

Carpentier, Alejo

Castellanos, Rosario

Castro, Rosalía de

Cattopadhyay, Bankim-Chandra

Cavafy, Constantine P.

Cela, Camilo José

Celan, Paul

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand

Césaire, Aimé

Chamoiseau, Patrick

Char, René

Chateaubriand, François-René de

Chatterjee, Upamanyu

Chatterji, Sarat Chandra

Chekhov, Anton

Chen Yuan-tsung

Chernyshevsky, Nikolay

Chughtai, Ismat

Cixous, Hélène

classicism

Claudel, Paul

Cliff, Michelle

Cocteau, Jean

Coetzee, J. M.

Colette

Collymore, Frank

Condé, Maryse

Constant, Benjamin

Cortázar, Julio

costumbrismo

Cronin, Jeremy

Curnow, Allen

dada

Daglarca, Fazil Hüsnü

dalit literature

D'Annunzio, Gabriele

Darío, Rubén

Darwish, Mahmud

Davies, Robertson

De Kok, Ingrid

decadence

Dépestre, René

Desai, Anita

Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline

Devi, Mahasweta

Dhammachoti, Ussiri

Dhasal, Namdeo

Dinesen, Isak

Ding Ling

Diop, Birago

Diop, David

Djebar, Assia

Döblin, Alfred

Donoso, José

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Dudintsev, Vladimir Dmitrievich

Duras, Claire de

Duras, Marguerite

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich

Eco, Umberto

Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich

Eich, Günter

Éluard, Paul

Elytis, Odysseus

Emecheta, Buchi

Enchi Fumiko

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Espinet, Ramabai

Espronceda y Delgado, José de

Esterházy, Péter

existentialism

expressionism

Fadeyev, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

Faiz, Faiz Ahmed

Falkner, Gerhard

Fallaci, Oriana

Farah, Nuruddin

feminism

Feng Zhi

Ferré, Rosario

fin de siècle

Fischer, Caroline Auguste

Flanagan, Richard

Flaubert, Gustave

Fo, Dario

Fontane, Theodor

Foscolo, Ugo

Fraire, Isabel

Frame, Janet

Freud, Sigmund

Freyre, Gilberto de Mello

Fried, Erich

Frisch, Max

Fuentes, Carlos

futurism

Gandhi, Mohandas

Gao Xingjian

García Lorca, Federico

García Márquez, Gabriel

Gary, Romain

Gautier, Théophile

generation of 1898

Genet, Jean

George, Stefan

Ghālib, Mirzā

Ghosh, Amitav

Gide, André

Ginzburg, Natalia

Giraudoux, Jean

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von

Gogol, Nikolai

Gombrowicz, Witold

Gomringer, Eugen

Gonçalves Dias, Antônio

Goncharov, Ivan

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules

Goodison, Lorna

Goodyear, Sara Suleri

Gordimer, Nadine

Gorky, Maxim

Grass, Günter

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm

Grossman, David

Grünbein, Durs

Grünzweig, Dorothea

Gruppe 47

Guillén, Jorge

Guillén, Nicolás

Gumilev, Nikolay

Gunesekera, Romesh

Gunnarsson, Gunnar

Haasse, Hella S.

Habibi, Emile

Hagiwara Sakutarō

Hamsun, Knut

Han Yongun

Handke, Peter

Harris, Wilson

Hašek, Jaroslav

Hasluck, Nicholas

Hauptmann, Gerhart

Havel, Václav

Hayashi Fumiko

Hayashi Kyōko

Hayslip, Le Ly

Head, Bessie

Hébert, Anne

Heine, Heinrich

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich

Hesse, Hermann

Higuchi Ichiyō

Hikmet, Nazim

Ho Xuan Huong

Hoffmann, E. T. A.

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von

Hölderlin, Friedrich

Höllerer, Walter

Hosseini, Khaled

Houellebecq, Michel

Hu Shih

Huang Chunming

Huchel, Peter

Hugo, Victor

Huysmans, Joris-Karl

Hwang Sun-won

Hwang Tonggyu

Hyder, Qurratulain

Ibsen, Henrik

Idris, Yūsuf

Indianism

Ionesco, Eugène

Ipellie, Alootook

Iqbāl, Muhammad

Ishigaki Rin

Jaccottet, Philippe

James, C. L. R.

Jarry, Alfred

Jelinek, Elfriede

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer

Jiménez, Juan Ramón

Johnson, Pauline

Johnson, Uwe

Jünger, Ernst

Kabbani, Nizar

Kafka, Franz

Kanik, Orhan Veli

Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich

Karnad, Girish

Kaschnitz, Marie Luise

Kauraka Kauraka

Kawabata Yasunari

Kazantzakis, Nikos

Kemal, Yaşar

Keneally, Thomas

Kertész, Imre

Kincaid, Jamaica

Kirsch, Sarah

Kiš, Danilo

Kogawa, Joy

Köhler, Barbara

Kokoschka, Oskar

Kundera, Milan

Kunene, Mazisi

Kunert, Günter

Kurahashi Yumiko

La Guma, Alex

Lagerkvist, Pär

Lagerlöf, Selma

Laing, B. Kojo

Laird, Christopher

Lamartine, Alphonse de

Lamming, George

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di

Langgässer, Elisabeth

Lao She

Larsson, Karl Stig-Erland

Lasker-Schüler, Else

Laurence, Margaret

Lautréamont, comte de

Lawson, Henry

Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave

Leiris, Michel

Leopardi, Giacomo

Lermontov, Mikhail

Levi, Carlo

Levi, Primo

Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin

Lispector, Clarice

Liu E

Lu Xun

Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria

Machado y Ruiz, Antonio

Machado y Ruiz, Manuel

Madariaga, Salvador de

Maeterlinck, Maurice

magic realism

Mahfouz, Naguib

Maillet, Antonine

Mala'ika, Nazik al-

Malange, Nise

Mallarmé, Stéphane

Malouf, David

Malraux, André

Mandelstam, Osip Yemilyevich

Mann, Heinrich

Mann, Thomas

Mansfield, Katherine

Manzoni, Alessandro

Marcel Pagnol

Maron, Monika

Maupassant, Guy de

Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Meeks, Brian

Mehta, Gita

Memmi, Albert

Menchú, Rigoberta

Michaux, Henri

Mickiewicz, Adam

Milosz, Czeslaw

Miron, Gaston

Mishima Yukio

Mistral, Gabriela

Mistry, Rohinton

Mo Yan

Montale, Eugenio

Mootoo, Shani

Morante, Elsa

Mori Ōgai

Mrożek, Slawomir

Müller, Heiner

Müller, Herta

Munonye, John

Munro, Alice

Murakami Haruki

Musil, Robert

Musset, Alfred de

Nabokov, Vladimir

Naidu, Sarojini

Naipaul, V. S.

Narayan, R. K.

Natsume Sōseki

naturalism

Naubert, Benedikte

Ndebele, Njabulo

negritude

Neruda, Pablo

Nerval, Gérard de

Neto, António Agostinho

new novel

NgũgĨ wa Thiong'o

Nguyen Du

Nichol, bp

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Nkosi, Lewis

Nobre, António

Nooteboom, Cees

Nortje, Arthur

Nwapa, Flora

Ōba Minako

Ōe Kenzaburō

Ogot, Grace

Okara, Gabriel

Ondaatje, Michael

Onetti, Juan Carlos

Ortega y Gasset, José

Ostrovsky, Nikolai

Oz, Amos

Pagis, Dan

Pak Mogwol

Pamuk, Orhan

Pardo Bazán, Emilia de

Pasolini, Pier Paolo

Pasternak, Boris

Paton, Alan

Pavese, Cesare

Pavlova, Karolina Karlovna

Paz, Octavio

p'Bitek, Okot

Perec, Georges

Peretz, Isaac Lieb

Pérez Galdós, Benito

Perse, Saint-John

Pirandello, Luigi

poetic realism

Ponge, Francis

Popa, Vasko

postcolonialism

postmodernism

Premchand, Munshi

Proust, Marcel

Pushkin, Alexander

Quasimodo, Salvatore

Queirós, José María de

Queiróz, Raquel de

Queneau, Raymond

Quental, Antero Tarquínio de

Rabéarivelo, Jean-Joseph

Ravikovitch, Dahlia

realism

Remarque, Erich Maria

Rhys, Jean

Richler, Mordecai

Rifaat, Alifa

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Rimbaud, Arthur

Rinser, Luise

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

Roberts, Charles

Romanticism

Rosas, Oscar

Roy, Arundhati

Rushdie, Salman

S. Ansky

Sachs, Nelly Leonie

Sadawi, Nawal

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de

Saleh, Tayyib

Samman, Ghada

San Juan, Epifanio

Sand, George

Saramago, José

Sargeson, Frank

Sarraute, Nathalie

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Satyanarayana, Visvanatha

scapigliatura

Schiller, Friedrich von

Schulz, Bruno

Schwarz-Bart, Simone

Sebald, W. G.

Seferis, George

Seifert, Jaroslav

Sembène, Ousmane

Senghor, Léopold Sédar

Sereny, Gitta

Serote, Mongane Wally

Seth, Vikram

Shalamov, Varlam

Shields, Carol

Shiga Naoya

Sholokhov, Mikhail

Shute, Nevil

Sienkiewicz, Henryk

Simenon, Georges

Simon, Claude

Singer, Isaac Bashevis

Škvorecký, Josef

So Chōng-ju

socialist realism

Södergran, Edith

Solovyov, Vladimir

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

Souza, Eunice de

Soyinka, Wole

Sri Sri

Staël, Germaine de

Stead, Christina

Stendhal

Storni, Alfonsina

Strindberg, August

Svevo, Italo

symbolists

Szymborska, Wislawa

Tabucchi, Antonio

Tagore, Rabindranath

Takamura Kōtarō

Tanikawa Shuntaro

Tanizaki Jun'ichiro

theater of the absurd

Tian Jian

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta

Tolstoy, Leo

Torres Bodet, Jaime

Trakl, Georg

Tsushima Yūko

Tsvetaeva, Marina

Turgenev, Ivan

Tuwim, Julian

Tzara, Tristan

Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de

Undset, Sigrid

Ungaretti, Giuseppe

Valéry, Paul

Vallejo, César

Vargas Llosa, Mario

Vassilikos, Vassilis

Verga, Giovanni

verismo

Verlaine, Paul

Vigny, Alfred de

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste

Voinovich, Vladimir

Walcott, Derek

White, Patrick

Wicomb, Zoë

Wiesel, Elie

Wittig, Monique

Wolf, Christa

world modernism

Wright, Judith

Yacine, Kateb

Yamada Eimi

Yáñez, Mirta

Yathay Pin

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny

Yosano Akiko

Yourcenar, Marguerite

Yu Guangzhong

Yun Tongju

Zagajewski, Adam

Zamyatin, Yevgeny

Zola, Émile

Entries

Abbas, Khawaja Ahmad

(b. 1914–d. 1987)

Indian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter

Khawaja Ahmad Abbas was born in Panipat, India, into a privileged, upper-middle-class family. After graduating from the University of Aligarh, Abbas became a journalist and went on to write novels and screenplays. While studying law, Abbas founded a fledgling newspaper called Aligarh Opinion. He was also a major Hindi movie director and screenwriter. Throughout his career, Abbas used films because of their accessibility to the uneducated and poor to promote his views on social castes and class conflicts. Abbas was also one of the founders and a member of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), which produced two of his plays.

Like many other writers, Abbas was concerned with national politics and wrote from a marxist, sociopolitical perspective. This attitude was fostered and grew under the influence of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) and Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). Some of Abbas's most famous English works are Tomorrow Is Ours: A Novel of the India of Today (1943) and Inquilab: A Novel of the Indian Revolution (1955). These novels are good examples of Abbas's treatment of the oppressed as they struggle against social and political systems such as untouchability, fascism, and imperialism. His screenplay for the classic Hindi movie Awara (Vagabond, 1952) is perhaps one of Indian cinema's most lyrical and compelling compositions on the irrepressible human spirit against the shadow of colonial capitalism.

In 1951, Abbas established his own film production company. His movie Pardesi (Foreigner) was selected for screening at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival in France. In 1968, Abbas was awarded the Padma Shri in recognition of his contribution to Indian literature.

Further Information

Another Work by K. A. Abbas

The World Is My Village: A Novel with an Index. Columbia, Mo.: South Asia Books, 1984.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Abe Kōbō

Also known as: Abe Kimifusa

(b. 1924–d. 1993)

Japanese novelist, short story writer, playwright

Abe Kōbō was born in Tokyo to Abe Asakichi and Yorimi. He moved to Manchuria with his family in 1925 but returned to Tokyo to finish high school. In 1943, he entered the medical department of Tokyo Imperial University, graduating in 1948.

Abe's first work was reflective of his experiences in Manchuria. In On the Sign at the End of the Road (1948), an opium addict relates his story of flight and imprisonment in Manchuria at the end of World War II. The narration is conveyed through a series of notebooks that the protagonist kept during the war as he mused over the nature of his native country and the loss of his home.

Abe's writing quickly became more surrealistic. The novel The Crime of S. Karma (1951) portrays a man who wakes up one morning to find that he has lost his identity. When he arrives at work, he finds that his business card has stolen his identity and, with the help of his fountain pen, wristwatch, and glasses, is making a play for his secretary. Like many of Abe's stories, The Crime of S. Karma combines logic and fantasy. The story won the Akutagawa Prize for new writers.

In the 1950s, Abe joined the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and wrote for publications associated with the party. However, by the late 1950s, Abe was writing articles critical of the JCP's restrictive policies, which earned his expulsion in 1962.

During this period, Abe also began writing science fiction stories. As a genre, science fiction was new to Japan, but Abe broke open the field with his novel Inter Ice Age 4, serialized in the journal Sekai from 1958 to 1959. In the story, the scientist Katsumi uses a computer to predict the future and discovers that a future race of gilled underwater dwellers has condemned him because he cannot adapt to the changes that are in store for society.

Abe's most acclaimed writing was published in the 1960s: The Woman in the Dunes (1962), The Face of Another (1964), and The Ruined Map (1967). All three novels explore the theme of alienated protagonists who must overcome or accept change. For example, in The Face of Another, the protagonist's face has been disfigured, so he creates a latex mask to hide his scars. However, with the mask, he assumes a new identity, and the mask eventually forms its own identity and threatens to take over the wearer. The Ruined Map follows suit with a detective who searches for a missing husband and, during the process, becomes jealous of the freedom the escaped husband has found. The most well known of the three novels, The Woman in the Dunes, portrays the kidnapping of a man who collects insects as a hobby. Held captive in a dwelling at the foot of the sand dunes, he must come to term with his new life.

In the next decade, Abe founded an experimental theater troupe called the Abe Kōbō Studio. For nine years, he directed plays, adapted a number of his stories, and wrote several plays for the troupe. Notably, one of these adaptations—Friends (1967)—has been translated into several languages and performed internationally. It tells the story of a man whose life is invaded by a family who adopts him, moves into his apartment, and takes over his life.

Following the disbanding of the troupe in 1979, Abe wrote only three major novels: Secret Rendezvous (1977), The Ark Sakura (1984), and Kangaroo Notebook (1991). Unlike his earlier stories, these novels were not greeted with acclaim because they are difficult to interpret. For example, in Secret Rendezvous, a man searches for his missing wife in a hospital. During his investigation, he meets a man with a horse's body as well as a cavalcade of other strange characters. The reader is bombarded not only with bizarre visual images but also with a cacophony of sound imagery.

Abe died of heart failure while writing his final novel, The Flying Man, which was published posthumously in 1993.

Critical Analysis

Kōbō Abe made his international reputation with his 1962 novel Suna no onna (literally, Sand Woman, or more commonly The Woman in the Dunes). Abe's novels were favorably compared to those of Franz Kafka, as they explored similar themes about the inherent meaninglessness or absurdity of human action in the face of an infinite, uncaring universe. Critic J. Thomas Rimes writes, Abe uses every emotion, from pride and fear to sexual desire and despair, to force his protagonist, and so his reader, into an acute self-awareness of the absurdity of human condition.

In The Woman in the Dunes, Abe focuses on Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur etymologist who, on a research trip during a holiday, finds himself through a series of unfortunate circumstances in a shack at the bottom of a vast sand pit, where lives an enigmatic woman who every night shovels away the slowly advancing sand dunes from her home. Held against his will in the pit, Jumpei transforms into a modern Sisyphus, doomed to shovel out an endless avalanche of sand in order to protect himself and the village from burial by the massive dunes that surround it. In a Kafkaesque twist, Jumpei's life begins to mirror that of the insects he studies, continuously moving sand from one pile to another in order to stave off the inevitable death. The village, Abe writes, resembling the cross section of a beehive, lay sprawled over the dunes. Or rather the dunes lay sprawled over the village. Abe's visual description of the village prepares the reader for the central thematic thrust of the novel, which is articulated by Jumpei when, early on in the novel, he asks the woman, Are you shovelling to survive, or surviving to shovel? Are our actions truly intended for a quality, or a quantity, of life?

Abe was also a renowned playwright, best known internationally for his 1967 one-act play The Man Who Turnedinto a Stick, described by one critic as a play that isn't easily understood, and many people believe that that is exactly how he wanted it. Like his contemporaries Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, Abe explored themes of solitude and alienation in his plays, producing powerful images. The Man Who Turned into a Stick focuses on a literal stick that falls from the sky and is discovered by Hippie Girl and Hippie Boy who consider its origins, only to learn that the stick is alive. Abe confronts his audience with an obviously absurd scenario in order to explore the meaning of life and death as an essential aspect of the human condition. In the final moments of the play, a character advances toward the audience and says, Look—there's a whole forest of sticks around you … All those sticks. You may never be judged, but at least you don't have to worry about being punished. This pronouncement is merely, he claims, the simple truth, the truth as I see it.

Further Information

Other Works by Abe Kōbō

Beyond the Curve. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. New York: Kodansha International, 1991.

The Box Man. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Three Plays. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Aboriginal literature and culture

Aboriginal people have inhabited Australia for between 40,000 and 100,000 years. Prior to English settlement in 1788, Aboriginal people had minimal contact with other peoples. Their culture was very diverse, with more than 200 different languages spoken, but they shared a commonality of territoriality, kinship, family structures, the Dreamtime, spirituality, and ceremonies. The Dreamtime and dream songs of the Aborigines reveal their sense of sacred interrelation with the land and all other living creatures. They also explain the group's spiritual life and history and are the traditional source of their music, painting, and storytelling. Dreamtime connects the past, present, and future in a sacred spiritual reality.

A well-known musical form is the corroboree, a singing of life stories, rich in rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and poetry. This is part of a translation of a corroboree called Moonbone: Now the moon is changing, having cast away his bone/ Gradually he grows larger, taking on new bone and flesh. Rock paintings and engravings also show the richness of the imagination in Aboriginal culture. Sacred rituals include singing, music, dance, and performance.

After colonization, European settlers appropriated Aboriginal lands and, through conquest and policies of forced assimilation (children were stolen from their parents and placed in European families), almost wiped out Aboriginal culture. However, beginning in 1938, an Aboriginal movement emerged that began to demand civil rights. This movement, influenced by the American Civil Rights movement, became stronger in the 1960s and again in the 1990s when Aborigines won some land rights and an apology from the Australian government for past abuses.

Aboriginal storytelling and poetry is very strongly influenced by traditional oral narratives. The storyteller Pauline McLeod, for example, has revived and created dream songs for a modern Aboriginal audience that had largely forgotten them. The following few lines of a typical modern poem, by Stephen Clayton, express the Aboriginal loss of a connectedness to nature:

I am born of the land, my soul is the sun

Nature is my mother,

I am Mother Nature's son

The wind is my spirit, running wild, running free

Water is my mirror, reflecting visions in me

I am like a great river that slowly runs dry

Polluted and abused, I am the River slowly—I die with.…

Anthropologists such as Robert Louis Nathan and Kingsley Palmer have revealed Aboriginal culture to the rest of the world, but it was not until the 1960s that the world heard the voice of the Aborigines speaking for themselves about their lives. Monica Clare's Karobran: The Story of an Aboriginal Girl (1978) is the first novel ever written by an Aboriginal woman. It was completed, edited, and published by Jack Horner because Monica Clare died in 1973 before she could finish the book. Karobran means togetherness. The book is a moving autobiographical novel about Isabelle, an Aboriginal girl who was removed from her family and ill-treated as a domestic servant.

Several other Aboriginal writers followed Monica Clare. Hyllus Maris (1934–1986) wrote Women of the Sun in the early 1950s, but the book was not published until 1985. It is a collection of stories of the lives of strong Aboriginal women who looked to the ancestors for guidance. Jack Davis (1917–2000), a noted poet and playwright, belonged to the Nyoongarah people of southwest Australia and later became the editor of the Aboriginal Publications Foundation. His first play, Kullark (1982), was popular as a documentary on the history of the Aboriginals in western Australia. He also wrote The Dreamers (1982) and No Sugar (1986), both known for their depth and closeness to the reality of the Aboriginal experience. No Sugar was voted the best stage play of the year by the Australian Writers Guild.

Oodegeroo Noonuccal, commonly known as Kath Walker, started writing in the 1950s. Her poems were about the struggles of the Aboriginal people and their demands for land rights and education. Noonuccal combined social issues with literature, thus revealing her depth of experience and a unique skill with the English language. She is one of Australia's greatest poets. Faith Bandler (1920– ) wrote Wacvie (1977), in which she retraces her father's history as a forced worker on a sugar plantation in Queensland. Writers such as Noonuccal and Bandler also built political coalitions to lobby for positive changes for the Aborigines.

Holding up the Sky: Aboriginal Women Speak (1999) is a collection of powerful stories by Aboriginal women. They talk about issues concerning displacement from their homelands, forced removal from families, physical abuse, and lost identities. Collections like this one and Writing Us Mob: New Indigenous Voices (2000) are of great value because these are the voices of the Aborigines.

B. Wongar's The Track to Bralgu (1977) is a collection of 12 short stories that portray the barrenness of the once fertile land of the Aborigines and the exploitation by the white world of all the Aborigines' resources.

Several writers of mixed origin emerged to tell the stories of the Aboriginal experience because the government considered them to be Aborigines. One such writer is Sally Morgan (1951– ), who wrote My Place (1987), an autobiography tracing the lives of her ancestors of the Nyoongal people of southwest Australia. Morgan captures their struggles to be educated and find jobs to sustain their families. She emphasizes the importance of the family roots that kept her family together. She also talks about the deep Aboriginal spirituality that believes in the spirits of the ancestors protecting future generations.

Today, there are institutions that specifically promote Aboriginal art and literature, such as the Aboriginal Center in Perth, the Aboriginal Publications Foundation, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, and the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australian Arts Council.

The Aboriginal literary movement emerged from autobiographies and life experiences. Memoirs written by women are often referred to as herstories. They reveal a strong sense of the writers' connection with the land and the spirit world. Herstories are self-presentations, an expression of the self as part of others, even across generations. They were also a means of resisting government control. Aboriginal writings are seen by some scholars as political acts in themselves, as the writers fight against the oblivion imposed on Aborigines by the white culture to identify, recognize, and recapture some of the social, spiritual, and literary elements of the Aboriginal past.

Further Information

Works about the Aboriginal Movement

Brock, Peggy, ed. Women, Rites and Sites: Aboriginal Women's Cultural Knowledge. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1900.

Clayton, Stephen. I Am-Aborigine. Available online at www.dreamtime.auz.net/StoryAbor.htm.

Heiss, Anita, ed. Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature. Montreal: McGill University Press, 2008.

Nathan, Robert Louis. The Dreamtime. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1975.

Simms, Norman. Silence and Invisibility: A Study of the New Literature from the Pacific. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1986.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Abrahams, Peter Henry

Also known as: Peter Graham

(b. 1919–d. 2017)

South African novelist, short story writer, journalist

When Peter Abrahams was five years old, his father, an Ethiopian, died. Abrahams was sent to live with relatives in Johannesburg, South Africa, far from his mixed-race mother. Although he returned three years later, the family's desperate financial situation forced young Abrahams to go to work for a metal worker. This nine-year-old boy was to grow up to become one of South Africa's best-known writers.

When Abrahams was still a young man, an office worker took him under her wing and read Shakespeare to him, awakening a lifelong love of learning. Throughout many years of menial employment, Abrahams held fast to his educational dreams, going to school when he could. At one point, Abrahams even tried to start a school for poor, black, and colored South Africans, one where native languages could be spoken.

When Abrahams was 20, he took a job as a stoker on a freighter bound for England. Abrahams wrote regularly, publishing his first books during World War II: a collection of short stories, Dark Testament (1942), and a novel, Song of the City (1945), which begins to examine the costs of urbanization for black South Africans, a theme he took up again more successfully two years later in Mine Boy. His growing professional reputation made it possible for him to return to South Africa in 1952, when he took a job as a reporter for The London Observer.

His work as a journalist, including employment as a scriptwriter for the BBC, provided the opportunity to write creatively. Of Abrahams's eight novels, the two that have most solidified his reputation are Mine Boy (1946) and Wild Conquest (1951). Both novels deal with the great movements of peoples within South Africa during its several centuries of settlement and development. Wild Conquest focuses on the Great Trek of the Boers in the 19th century. These descendants of Dutch settlers spread north from Cape Province in search of a religious and secular paradise. They inevitably encountered indigenous peoples, including the Matabeles, who challenged the Boers' sense of mission. Because the descendants of the Boers were to set the foundation for the next century's apartheid laws, Abrahams's focus on these interactions combines historical perspective with contemporary focus. This type of novelistic approach made him something of a literary spokesperson for the developing antiapartheid movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Mine Boy follows a migration of a different sort: the economic movement of people in search of jobs in mines and in urban areas. Such economic migrations led to the dissolution of families and the creation of company- and industry-controlled living areas. Although this novel calls for a multiracial coexistence as the only possible future for South Africa, the story ends with the deaths of many characters who embraced this noble goal.

Critical reception of Abrahams's many essays, novels, and autobiographical writings has been mixed, in part because of the contradictory messages of novels such as Mine Boy. However, his fusion of a European narrative style with a focus on African themes and tendencies made Abrahams one of the first voices from South Africa to question the divisiveness of apartheid from the perspective of a person of color.

Further Information

Other Works by Peter Abrahams

The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

A Night of Their Own. New York: Knopf, 1965.

The View from Coyaba. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.

Works about Peter Abrahams

Lindfors, Bernth. Exile and Aesthetic Distance: Geographical Influences on Political Commitment in the Works of Peter Abrahams. International Fiction Review 13 (Summer 1986).

Wade, Michael. Peter Abrahams. London: Evans Bros., 1972.

———. Peter Abrahams at 70. Southern African Review of Books (June/July 1989). Available online. URL: http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/antho4html/Wade.html.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Achebe, Chinua

(b. 1930– )

Nigerian novelist

Source: Carlo Bavagnoli. Getty Images. Time Life Pictures.

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (ah CHAY bay) was born in Ogidi, eastern Nigeria, when Nigeria was a British colony. His father, Isaiah Okafor Achebe, was raised according to the traditions of the Ibgo people but converted to Christianity and became a church teacher. His mother, Janet Achebe, told him traditional folktales as he was growing up. Achebe learned to respect the old ways even as his country was adopting new ones.

After studying at University College in Ibadan, Achebe received a B.A. from London University in 1953. He became a producer and eventually a director for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company. In 1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli, with whom he had four children. After establishing his reputation as a writer, he left broadcasting in 1966. When civil war broke out the following year—eastern Nigeria, the Igbo homeland, attempted to secede from the Nigerian federation as a new country called Biafra—he traveled abroad to promote the Biafran cause. Beware, Soul Brother (1971) describes his war experiences, including his family's narrow escape when their apartment was hit by a bomb. In 1976, he became professor of English at the University of Nigeria. A serious car accident in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down. In June 2007, Achebe won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction. The $120,000 prize is awarded for a body of work. Achebe is currently the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

In Home and Exile (1988), Achebe writes that he decided to become a writer after reading Joyce Cary's Mr. Johnson. Critics praised the book's realistic portrayal of Africa, but Achebe thought its Nigerian hero was an embarrassing nitwit. He decided that the story we had to tell could not be told for us by anyone else, no matter how gifted and well-intentioned. His novels tell the story of Nigeria from the inside, from Igbo resistance to British colonization through the coup that established the commander of the Nigerian army, General Ironisi, as head of state in 1966.

Critical Analysis

Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), tells the story of Okonwo, a great man among his people but someone who cannot adapt to the changes brought by colonization. Achebe does not idealize the old ways, but he presents them as worthy of respect. However, as Okonkwo's son Obierika tells him, He [the white man] has put a knife on the things that held us together, and we have fallen apart. Okonkwo's refusal to adapt leads him to violence and ultimately to destruction. As Achebe explained in a 2000 interview in Atlantic, With the coming of the British, Igbo land as a whole was incorporated … with a whole lot of other people with whom the Igbo people had not had direct contact before.… You had to learn a totally new reality, and accommodate yourself to the demands of this new reality, which is the state called Nigeria.

Things Fall Apart established Achebe as the founding father of modern African literature, according to Harvard philosopher K. Anthony Appiah. Achebe was the first novelist to present colonization from an African point of view. He also introduced what he calls a new English, using Igbo proverbs and pidgin English to express the African oral tradition in English. As editor of the journal Okike, which he founded in 1971, Achebe continues to promote new African writing.

The most influential of his works, Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than 50 languages. In the Atlantic interview, Achebe explains its appeal: There are many, many ways in which people are deprived or subjected to all kinds of victimization—it doesn't have to be colonization. Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story.

At the beginning of Achebe's second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), Okonkwo's grandson Obi is on trial for accepting bribes. Obi is one of the educated elite to whom the British plan to turn over the government when Nigeria becomes independent. Like his grandfather, Obi was another victim of cultural conflict, notes Bernth Lindfors. Obi had been weaned away from traditional values but had not fully assimilated Western ideals; having no firm moral convictions, he was confused by his predicament and fell. Torn between tradition and modern ways, Obi—and his generation—are no longer at ease.

Arrow of God (1964) is set in the 1920s. Enzelu, chief priest of the patron god of his Igbo village, finds himself caught in a conflict between his people and British colonial administrators, who want to make him village chieftain. Gerald Moore, in Seven African Writers, notes that As in Achebe's other novels, it is the strong-willed man of tradition who cannot adapt, and who is crushed by virtues in the war between the new, more worldly order, and the old conservative values of an isolated society.

The narrator of Achebe's fourth novel, A Man of the People, is involved in a fictional coup that foreshadows the actual coup the occurred the year the novel was published. Odili, a schoolteacher, at first supports M. A. Nanga, a villager who has become minister of culture, but runs against him when he realizes that Nanga abuses his power. Although set in the fictional Republic of Kangan, the satire has obvious parallels to present-day Nigeria. The novel reflects the conviction Achebe expressed in The Trouble with Nigeria (1983): "Hopeless as it may seem today, Nigeria is not absolutely beyond redemption. Critical, yes, but not entirely hopeless. Nigerians are what they are only because their leaders are not what they should be."

In 1979, Achebe received the Order of the Federal Republic for his contributions to African literature. I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them, he reflected in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975). Today, he is recognized as the first African to adapt the conventions of the European novel successfully and is Africa's most widely translated writer.

Further Information

Another Work by Chinua Achebe

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays. New York: Knopf, 2009.

Works about Chinua Achebe

Ezenwa-Ohaeto. Chinua Achebe: A Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Lindfors, Bernth. Conversations with Chinua Achebe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

———. Early Achebe. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc., 2009.

Moore, Gerald. Seven African Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

acmeism

Acmeism (a term derived from the Greek word meaning perfection) was a Russian poetic movement established in St. Petersburg in 1913. In a sense, acmeism was a reactionary movement that opposed the mystical elements of Symbolism. The poets Nikolai Gumilev, Sergey Gorodetsky (1884–1967), Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam were the leaders of the movement and regularly contributed to Apollon, the main literary journal of acmeism. According to the acmeists, poetry should contain concrete ideas about culture and human experience rather than abstract and, often, solipsistic notions that are found in symbolist poetry. At the same time, however, the acmeists incorporated the symbolist emphasis on the role of mythical and religious figures in poetry. The mythical figures found in acmeist poetry stressed continuity of history and culture.

The movement lasted until the early 1920s and eventually disintegrated with the advent of socialist realism. The role of the acmeists, however, is enormous in terms of their influence on the later generations of poets and writers. The acmeists attempted to provide verse with significance that extended the bounds of social and political reality. Their revolution was of a linguistic kind. The acmeists treated the individual as a being of cosmic significance rather than a dispossessed creature, tethered to a landscape grown ungovernably hostile.

Further Information

A Work about Acmeism

Doherty, Justin. The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry: Culture and the Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Adiga, Aravind

(b. 1974– )

Indian novelist, journalist

Indian-born writer Aravind Adiga came to literary prominence when his critically acclaimed first novel, The White Tiger (2008), received the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Born in Chennai (Madras), India, on October 23, 1974, he was raised in Mangalore in the state of Karnataka, attending St. Aloysius High School. In 1990, Adiga emigrated to Sydney, Australia. He then relocated to New York City, attending Columbia University, graduating second in his class with a B.A. in English literature in 1997. Adiga attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received a master's degree. Beginning in 2000, Adiga worked as a journalist for the Financial Times covering Wall Street and returned to India in 2003 as a correspondent for Time magazine, writing chiefly about business, politics, and arts.

A novel written as a series of letters from Balram Halwai, a newly rich chauffeur, to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, The White Tiger presents a grimly sardonic picture of the seamy, striving underclass of contemporary India. In telling his life story in his self-serving way, Balram applies the triumphalist rhetoric associated with the modernization of India to the brutal institutionalized impoverishment from which he charts his ascent. The chief conceit of the novel divides India into haves and have-nots, the Darkness and the Light. In the old days there were 1,000 castes, Adiga writes. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. The son of a rickshaw driver who dies of tuberculosis, Balram emerges from a corrupt, hardscrabble existence where the sewage glistens and the teacher in the local school bullies and lies to his students. A visiting inspector gives Balram the name the White Tiger, the rarest of the rare, the only boy in a classroom of emaciated dullards to identify the photograph of a corrupt politician. This marks Balram's ambition, and as he manages to secure a position in Delhi he continues to mark the great division of modern Indian society.

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then, an egg will crack open—a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

Balram contrasts this picture with Old Delhi in a manner that amounts to a social critique:

Go to Old Delhi … and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages … They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

Balram turns out to be as much sociopath as social critic. Reminscent of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, Adiga's protagonist murders his employer and steals a large sum of cash with which he launches a taxi service in Bangalore, catering to a new class of technology workers.

As a parable of the new India, then, Balram's tale has a distinctly macabre twist, as Akash Kapur noted in the New York Times. He is not (or not only) an entrepreneur but a roguish criminal with a remarkable capacity for self-justification. Likewise, the background against which he operates is not just a resurgent economy and nation but a landscape of corruption, inequality and poverty. In accepting the Man Booker Prize, Adiga remarked that The White Tiger was an attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India—the voice of the colossal underclass. He dedicated it to the people of New Delhi where I lived and where I wrote this book.

With the success of The White Tiger, Adiga has subsequently published a number of editorials, book reviews, and a linked series of short stories entitled Between the Assassinations (2008). Written prior to The White Tiger, these stories mine a similar terrain to that of The White Tiger, describing economic, religious, and ethnic tensions in the southern Indian city of Kittur. The title refers to the period between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991 and signals Adiga's abiding interest in linking the small stories of peddlers and their like to the broad currents of Indian political life.

Given the success (and similar themes) of the 2009 motion picture Slumdog Millionaire, there has been growing interest in turning The White Tiger into a film. Adiga's second novel, Last Man in the Tower, is expected to be published in 2011. Unlike his first novel, which was set in New Delhi, Adiga's second book is set in Mumbai, where the author currently resides.

Further Information

A Work about Aravind Adiga

Merritt Moseley. Ordinary Novels. In Sewanee Review 118, no. 1 (winter 2010): 154–160.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Adonis

Also known as: Adunis; Ali Ahmad Sa'id

(b. 1930– )

Syrian-born Lebanese poet, critic

Adonis is one of the fathers of modernism in Arabic literature and is its leading proponent of avant-garde verse. Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1960) is his most important book of poems, combining his concern for history and politics with his demand for a new kind of poetic language and a radically experimental poetic form. The Static and the Dynamic in Arabic Culture is one of his many books of cultural theory and literary criticism that earned a key, if controversial, place on the Arabic bookshelf. In it, Adonis describes cycles of change and stagnation in the history of Arabic culture, defining moments of modernism as those times when creative new ways of looking at the world emerge and challenge habitual ways. These breakthroughs, themselves, gradually become habitual and inhibit creativity until the next moment breaks with tradition. In other volumes of theory, such as The Time of Poetry (1972), The Shock of Modernity (1978), and a massive work entitled simply The Book (1995), Adonis continues his philosophical task of clearing away what he sees as stagnant Arabic literary traditions and calling for an embrace of modernism.

Adonis is a proponent of intellectual poetry, opposing the traditional connection of Arabic poetics to musicality and tarab, the state of being entranced by a poem, typically a goal of Arabic poetry. A Grave for New York is a long, important political poem that cites Walt Whitman as an influence and also demonstrates the influence on Adonis of Symbolism and surrealism, and a cryptic, almost mystical use of language. So contrary are many of his poetic methods to Arabic expectations that his readership tends to be small, though refined. Adonis's literary criticism, on the other hand, has had considerable weight in the world of Arabic literature, through his books as well as his founding and editorship of two literary magazines, Shi'r (Poetry) with poet Yusuf al-Khal (1957), and Mawaqif (Stances) (1968).

Born in the Syrian mountains and educated in Syria, Adonis moved to Beirut and took Lebanese citizenship. Influenced in his belief in the importance of myth and symbol by Anton Sa'ada, founder of the Syrian Nationalist Socialist Party, Adonis changed his name to that of a figure from ancient Syrian myth. He has taught at the Sorbonne and other European and American universities and is translated most extensively in French. His wife of many years, Khalida Sa'id, is an important literary critic. In 2007, Adonis was awarded the Bjørnson Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression.

Further Information

Other Works by Adonis

The Blood of Adonis. Translated by Samuel Hazo. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971.

Introduction to Arabic Poetics. Translated by Catherine Cobham. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.

The Pages of Day and Night. Translated by Samuel Hazo. Evanston, Ill.: Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 1994.

Shatz, Adam. An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ. New York Times, July 13, 2002.

Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry by Samih al-Qasim, Adonis, and Mahmud Darwish. Translated by Abdullah al-Udhari. London: Al-Saqi Books, 1984.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Agnon, Samuel Joseph

Also known as: Shmuel Yosef Agnon; Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes

(b. 1888–d. 1970)

Polish-born Israeli novelist, short story writer

Samuel Joseph Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in the Jewish town of Buczacz, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Poland). Agnon began writing at eight years old in both Hebrew and Yiddish and published his first poems in a newspaper at age 15. Though he did not attend school, he was educated by both his father, a fur trader with rabbinical training, and his mother, who taught him German literature. In 1907, he left home for Palestine (now Israel), where he changed his surname from Czaczkes to Agnon. He remained there his entire life, with the exception of 11 years spent in Germany from 1913 to 1924.

His folk-epic The Bridal Canopy (1931), an allegory on the decline of the Jewish religious life in Poland, is considered a classic in modern Hebrew literature. The plot chronicles the travels and the inner religious turmoil of a Hasidic Jew who seeks a dowry for his daughters in early 19th-century Europe. Agnon's greatest novel, however, is The Day Before Yesterday (1945), which is set in the period of the second aliyah, the wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine between 1907 and 1913. The novel is considered a cornerstone of modern Hebrew literature.

Nearly all of Agnon's symbolic and folkloric writing is set in Palestine. Many of his stories are influenced by the Jewish emigration to Palestine, Jewish assimilation into Western culture, and the contrasts between a traditional Jewish life and a modern Jewish life.

Agnon secured his place as one of the central figures of modern world literature for bringing the conflicts of Jewish culture to life. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1965 and is widely considered the greatest writer of modern fiction in Hebrew.

Further Information

Other Works by Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Days of Awe. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

Only Yesterday. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Shira. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

A Simple Story. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

A Work about Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Shaked, Gershon. Shmuel Yosef Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist. Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Aichinger, Ilse

(b. 1921–d. 2016)

German-Austrian poet, short story writer, novelist

Ilse Aichinger was born in Vienna, Austria. Her father, Leopold, was a Jewish doctor, and her mother, Berta Kremer, was a gentile teacher. Aichinger grew up in Vienna and Linz, graduating from high school in 1939. The Nazis prevented her from attending medical school because of her Jewish heritage. During World War II, many of her relatives were killed in concentration camps. Aichinger became fiercely antifascist, a trait that would characterize her postwar writing.

Following the war, Aichinger enrolled in medical school in Vienna. She quit after five semesters to devote herself full time to a writing career. In 1948, she worked as a reader for Fischer Publishing Company and wrote Die Grö#946;ere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope, 1948), a novel about a Viennese girl who sympathizes with her Jewish friends after the Nazi takeover of Austria. The following year, Aichinger cofounded the Hochschule für Gestaltung (Academy for Arts and Designs) in Ulm, West Germany. She married poet Günter Eich in 1953. The couple occasionally attended the annual meetings of the German writers' association, Gruppe 47.

Aichinger wrote numerous short stories, radio plays, and poems in the second half of the 20th century. Influenced by the Holocaust, Aichinger's writings often take the perspective of the victims of German-Austrian society. Literary scholar James Alldridge explains that her appeal is to a humanity deep within each of us, addressed in a language unadorned by flourishes and unadorned by experiments in usage. Aichinger won numerous German and Austrian awards, including the Georg Trakl Prize for Poetry and the Literature Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Ilse Aichinger died on November 11, 2016.

Further Information

Other Works by Ilse Aichinger

The Bound Man and Other Stories. Translated by Eric Mosbacher. New York: Noonday Press, 1956.

Herod's Children. Translated by Cornelia Schaeffer. New York: Atheneum, 1963.

A Work about Ilse Aichinger

Alldridge, James C. Ilse Aichinger. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1969.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Aidoo, Ama Ata

Also known as: Christina Ama Ata Aidoo

(b. 1942– )

Ghanaian novelist, poet, dramatist

Ghana gained its independence from Britain in 1957 when Christina Ama Ata Aidoo was 15; thus, in a sense, Aidoo came of age at the same time as her country. Her very name, with its combination of Christian and indigenous elements (she dropped her Christian name in the early 1970s), speaks to Aidoo's lifelong passion for exploring the fusion of elements that makes her people unique. Aidoo's works speak to the synthesis of traditional and Christian beliefs inherent in Ghana. Her family has a tradition of resistance to oppression, including a grandfather who was killed by the British. Aidoo is descended from the Fante, a group that was particularly active in their resistance to the British during the colonial period in Ghana. The Fante are part of a larger group of people, the Akan, whose traditionalist values are explored—and questioned—in many of her texts.

At an early age, Aidoo won a short-story competition sponsored by a prestigious publisher. This led her to have confidence in herself as a voice for her people, but especially as a voice for women of color in Ghana and throughout the world. Because very few women in developing countries have easy access to educational opportunities, Aidoo has often written from the perspective of one who has succeeded against the odds. She voices the belief that education can lead to an awareness of a culture's limitations. In short-story collections such as No Sweetness Here (1970), poems such as those collected in An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems (1992), and in novels such as Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Aidoo voices a fierce resistance to gender subjugation—the oppression of women—and class domination. Her essay, To Be a Woman, published in 1980, bemoans the traditional Akan degradation of women. As such, Aidoo challenges both the vestiges of the British colonial presence and the ingrained attitudes of Africans.

Aidoo was Ghana's minister of education for a brief time in the early 1980s, until her controversial views led to her removal from office. She now lives primarily in Zimbabwe and the United States, where she has had a series of academic appointments. Aidoo is a regular speaker at African literary gatherings throughout the United States and the world, where she continues to influence those interested in issues of gender, race, and class.

Further Information

Another Work by Ama Ata Aidoo

Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press, 1985.

A Work about Ama Ata Aidoo

Nasta, Susheila, ed. Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Akhmadulina, Izabella Akhatovna

(b. 1937–d. 2010)

Russian poet

Izabella Akhmadulina was born in Moscow, Russia. She graduated from high school in 1954 and began her literary career working for a small newspaper Metrostroevets. In 1955, Akhmadulina began her studies at the prestigious Gorky Institute of Literature and published her first poem. During her studies, she was briefly expelled from the university for the apolitical focus of her verse. She was allowed to return only when Pavel Antokolsky, a respected Russian writer (1896–1978), intervened on her behalf. In 1958, she married the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but they were later divorced.

Akhmadulina is often associated with the New Wave of Russian poets that emerged after Stalin's death. The New Wave poets often focused on themes outside the political agenda of socialist realism. Akhmadulina, in particular, addressed the craft of poetry in her verse, often exploring metapoetics as a subject in itself. Akhmadulina considered Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova to be the greatest influences on her own work.

With the publication of her first poetry collection, Strings (1962), Akhmadulina established her position among the major contemporary poets of Russia. Her careful attention to the poetic form and diction made her enormously popular with both the Russian public and critics. During Akhmadulina's prolific career, she published eight books of verse: Chills (1968), Music Lessons (1969), Poems (1975), Candle (1977), Dreams of Georgia (1977), The Secret: New Poems (1983), The Garden (1987), Poems (1987), and Selected Works (1988). Virtually all of these books were critically acclaimed and celebrated for their lyrical beauty and impressive poetic form. These lines from Autumn are an example:

Not working, not breathing,

the beehive sweetens and dies.

The autumn deepens, the soul

ripens and grows round …

As Sonia I. Ketchian points out, Akhmadulina's poetry has been lauded for forcefulness of expression and masterful execution of form, in its finesse and sentient approach to her subject and its underlying surroundings, the product of Izabella Akhmadulina's pen bears the unmistakable signature of a woman.

Akhmadulina was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Literature in 1977, but at home she often faced government criticism, and she was not permitted to publish any works between 1977 and 1983. This government mandate, however, was completely reversed by 1989, when Akhmadulina was awarded the State Prize in Literature—the highest prize for literature in the Soviet Union. Her work is continuously acclaimed both in Russia and abroad. In 2004, Akhmadulina was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for literature.

Further Information

Works by Izabella Akhmadulina

Fever & Other New Poems. With an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Translated by Geoffrey Dutton and Igor Mezhakoff-Koriakin. New York: William Morrow, 1969.

The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose. Translated by F. D. Reeve. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.

A Work about Izabella Akhmadulina

Ketchian, Sonia I. The Poetic Craft of Bella Akhmadulina. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Akhmatova, Anna

Also known as: Anna Andreyevna Gorenko

(b. 1889–d. 1966)

Russian poet

Anna Akhmatova was born in a small town near Odessa, Russia, into a family of minor nobility. Her father, Andrey Gorenko, was a retired navy engineer, and her mother, Inna Gorenko, was in charge of the family affairs. The Akhmatovs moved to Zarskoye Selo, the birthplace of Aleksandr Pushkin, when Anna was one year old. Akhmatova began writing poetry when she was 11. While in school, Akhmatova was an academically average student, more concerned with writing poetry than studying. Her father disapproved of her writing and told her that it brought shame to the family's name. From then on, Anna Gorenko signed her work as Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova was an intense reader, and she particularly loved the poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin.

In 1907, Akhmatova began to study law at the university in Kiev. In 1910, she married the poet Nikolai Gumilev, whom she had known since her school days. These years of intense work and passionate personal relationships produced two collections of lyrical poems, Evening (1912) and Chiotki (1914), notable for their striking images and skillful use of rhyme and meter. In all her work, Akhmatova cared more about the craft of poetry and its personal implications than about social issues. Both volumes received favorable reviews from the critics. During this time, Akhmatova adhered to acmeism, a poetic movement that opposed symbolism and emphasized clarity of expression and concrete imagery. Along with Gumilev, Akhmatova became the leading figure of this movement.

In 1918, Akhmatova divorced Gumilev, but his political difficulties (he was executed in 1921 for alleged involvement in an anti-Soviet plot) affected her standing with the authorities, who were already uncomfortable with her poetic preoccupation with love and religion. Between 1923 and 1940, none of her work was published in book form, although a few poems were published in journals. She worked as an assistant librarian at the Agricultural Institute and lived in poverty. In the 1930s, she faced personal tragedy when her son and her second husband were arrested for espionage. They were released only after personal intervention by Stalin. Her lyric cycle Requiem was composed during this period; inspired by her grief over her son's absence, the poems memorialize the suffering of the entire Russian people under Stalin. They were not published in Russia until 1989, but Akhmatova developed an enormous underground following in Russia, as well as a large audience abroad. During World War II, when Germany invaded Russia and laid siege to Leningrad, Akhmatova was enlisted to help boost public morale with radio addresses and readings.

Akhmatova refused to conform to the standards of socialist realism, and for this she was ostracized by many in the Soviet Writers' Union. She criticized the Stalinist regime and paid dearly for her honesty when, in 1946, she was publicly humiliated and expelled from the Writers' Union. In addition, in 1949, her son was sent to Siberia as a political prisoner, remaining there until 1956. Even after Stalin's death in 1953, Akhmatova continued to be criticized by government officials because her work supposedly did not address the needs and reality of the Soviet people. In spite of these adversities, however, Akhmatova became one of Russia's most famous poets. Small volumes of her poems and translations and her critical essays on Pushkin began to be issued in Russia after 1958.

Akhmatova did not break with the rich tradition of Russian poetry but rather enriched it. She also introduced Russian readers to a larger world with her translations of such great poets as Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, and Giacomo Leopardi. Today, she is one of the most widely read and quoted poets in Russia. In addition to its extraordinary lyrical beauty, Akhmatova's poetry is associated with personal freedom, the expression of emotions, and political liberty.

During her lifetime Akhmatova received a number of awards, particularly from European countries, including the Etna-Taormina literary prize from the Italian government in 1964 and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1965. She established a reputation as a Russian Sappho in many countries.

Further Information

Other Works by Anna Akhmatova

Kunitz, Stanley, ed. Poems of Akhmatova: Izbrannye Stikhi. Translated by Max Hayward. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Meyer, Ronald, ed. My Half-century: Selected Prose. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

Reeder, Roberta, ed. The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Tucson, Ariz.: Zephyr Press, 1998.

Works about Anna Akhmatova

Dalos, Gyorgy. The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. Translated by Antony Wood. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.

Reeder, Roberta. Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet. New York: Picador, 1995.

Entry Author: Diamond, Marie Josephine, ed.

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

(b. 1892–d. 1927)

Japanese short story writer, poet, essayist

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke was born in Tokyo to Niihara Toshizō and Fuku. Shortly after his birth, his mother went insane, so Akutagawa was adopted by his uncle, Akutagawa Dōshō. He was an excellent student and took lessons in English and Chinese in addition to doing his regular schoolwork. In 1913, he entered the English department of Tokyo Imperial University. After graduating in 1916, he took up teaching at a naval school in Yokosuka and soon married Tsukamoto Fumiko. Three years later, he resigned to write stories full-time for the Osaka Mainichi Newspaper. In 1921, the newspaper sent him to China as a correspondent; however, health problems prevented him from writing any articles until he had returned home. At the age of 35, he committed suicide by drinking poison.

While still at university, Akutagawa began publishing short stories in a school literary magazine called Shinshichō (New tides) and he published a short story collection called Rashōmon (1915), set in medieval Kyoto. In 1916, the respected novelist Natsume