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BMTimes >> Writer Profiles
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
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R.K. Narayan : The author who gave birth to Malgudi
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R.K. Narayan, the famous Indian author, particularly known for his novels based on the fictional town Malgudi, is another example of success in writing despite the dislikes in institutional studies. Born in 1906 at Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Narayan maintained a constant detest for studies. He even failed to qualify for the graduation course in Arts. Though he liked English much, he never could grab a good score in the subject. Narayan sincerely started reading the classics in English literature and writing.
Narayan's first novel was 'Swami and His Friends'. It so happened as if Narayan suddenly visualized a little town and its rail station, the Albert Mission School, Market Road, the inhabitants and their daily lives. Malgudi was born. 'Swami and His Friends' got rejected from several Indian publishers. Narayan almost lost his hope when a mutual friend showed the draft to Graham Greene, the established author in London. Greene liked it so much that he arranged publication for it. After that a stream of novels by Narayan, all based upon Malgudi and its fictional characters, was published.
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Jeffrey Archer: An author whose life history could be a novel
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It can easily be said that Jeffrey Archer's own story could make up a novel itself. Born in London in 1940 and brought up in Somerset, the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, Jeffrey Archer got his education in Wellington School and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he gained an athletics blue, was President of the University Athletics Club, and went on to run the 100 yards in 9.6 seconds for Great Britain in 1966.
After leaving Oxford, he continued as a charity fundraiser, working for the National Birthday Trust, a medical charity. He set up his own fund raising company, Arrow Enterprises in 1969. At 29, Jeffrey became a Member of Parliament for Louth. After five years in commons he invested heavily on a Canadian company, which failed and left him with a huge debt and at the edge of bankruptcy.
Aged 34, determined to pay back his creditors in full, he sat down to write his first novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. The novel was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen and published first in US and then in Britain. The book was an immediate success, was televised by BBC and helped Archer avoid bankruptcy.
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Pablo Neruda
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One of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century, Pablo Neruda was born on July 12, 1904 in Parral, Chile. Neruda, whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was the son of Jose del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker. His mother Rosa Basoalto died when he was just a month old. As a child, Neruda was precocious by nature and began writing poetry when he was just ten years old. However, his father did not take kindly to his inclination for poetry, a reason why the young poet began to publish under the psudonym Pablo Neruda, which later became his legal name in 1946.
In his early years, Neruda was actively encouraged by Gabriela Mistral, the principal of the local Temuco Girls' School. Mistral herself was a gifted poet, who later won the Nobel Prize in 1945. By the age of sixteen, Neurda had already become an established writer of poetry, prose and journalism. After passing out of high school, Neruda moved to Santiago to pursue higher studies and became a French teacher there. Loneliness and hunger caught up with the young writer for the first time in his life, and he adopted a Bohemian lifestyle.
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