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Your country's writers.

Notibuti said:
Hey... that's cheating... Gibson's an American living in Canada...
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Yes, he's retained his US citizenship, but has lived in Canada since 1968, married a Canadian, and his children are Canadian. Besides, he graduated from my old alma mater and lives in the same city, so I'm claiming Canadian bragging rights. :D
 
Norwegian writers!!

Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) was a major Norwegian playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama."

Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of the most important playwrights of all time, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians.

His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.

Ibsen largely founded the modern stage by introducing a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Victorian-era plays were expected to be moral dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every drama was expected to result in a morally appropriate conclusion, meaning that goodness was to bring happiness, and immorality pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his times and shattered the illusions of his audiences.

List of works

* (1850) Catiline (Catilina)
* (1850) The Burial Mound (Kjæmpehøjen)
* (1852) St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten)
* (1854) Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
* (1855) The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
* (1856) Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
* (1857) The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
* (1862) Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
* (1863) The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
* (1865) Brand (Brand)
* (1867) Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
* (1869) The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
* (1873) Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
* (1877) Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter)
* (1879) A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem)
* (1881) Ghosts (Gengangere)
* (1882) An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
* (1884) The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
* (1886) Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
* (1888) The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet)
* (1890) Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
* (1892) The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
* (1894) Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf)
* (1896) John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
* (1899) When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)


Sigrid Undset (May 20, 1882 – June 10, 1949) was a Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1928.

Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In 1924, she converted to Catholicism. She fled Norway for the United States in 1940 because of her opposition to Nazi Germany and the German occupation, but returned after World War II ended in 1945.

Her best-known work is Kristin Lavransdatter, a modernist trilogy about life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages. The book was set in medieval Norway and was published from 1920 to 1922 in three volumes. Kristin Lavransdatter portrays the life of woman from birth until death. Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for this trilogy as well as her two books about Olav Audunssøn, published in 1925 and 1927.

Undset experimented with modernist tropes such as stream of consciousness in her novel, although the original English translation by Charles Archer excised many of these passages. In 1997, the first volume of Tiina Nunnally's new translation of the work won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in the category of translation. The names of each volume were translated by Archer as The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross, and by Nunally as The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross.

Works

* The Master of Hestviken series is of four volumes, which are listed in order below. Depending on the version, each volume could be of itself, or two volumes may be combined into one book. The latter tends to result from older printings.

* The Axe: The Master of Hestviken
* The Snake Pit: The Master of Hestviken
* In the Wilderness: The Master of Hestviken
* The Son Avenger: The Master of Hestviken

* Kristin Lavransdatter is a trilogy of three volumes. These are listed in order as well. Written during 1920-22, it won her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928.

* Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath.
* Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wife
* Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross

* Jenny was written in 1911. It is a story of a Norwegian painter who travels to Rome for inspiration. How things turn out, she had not anticipated.

* Jenny

* The Unknown Sigrid Undset, a collection of Undset's early existentialist works, including Tiina Nunnally's new translation of Jenny was assembled by Tim Page for Steerforth Press and published in 2001.


Knut Hamsun
Famouse work:
Pan
Hunger
Victoria
Growth of the Soil (it won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.)

Lars Saabye Christensen
Among his most noted work are the novels Beatles (1984) and Halvbroren (The Half Brother in English) (2001). In 2002 he received the The Nordic Council's Literature Prize for his book The Halfbrother. The book was also shortlisted for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

There is so many that deserve to be mention, check out this list for Wikipedia for more Norwegian writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Norwegian_Writers

Source: Wikipedia
 
I'm from Belarus, which was part of hte soviet union until about 15 years ago, so any writers from there are fairly recent. I can't claim that anyone like Pushkin or Dostoevsky was Belarusian, they were Russian..but fortunately I can still read them in russian.
 
I've been thinking about this thread. Problem is, it's hard to know which Swedish writers have been translated, how good those translations are, and whether they are available... but here are some:

Majgull Axelsson's April Witch is a hell of a book; not her best, but the only one of her novels that seems to be available in English. Magic realism with sneaky political overtones.

Torgny Lindgren is one of the older guard (he's still going strong at 79) and one I really need to read more of. His latest work is a trilogy of novels, only one of which is translated it seems, but that one - Hash - is an amazing little metastory about the nature of storytelling, and at the same time a very down-to-earth description of life in the deep North.

Klas Östergren's classic satire-cum-bohemian-manifesto Gentlemen, is apparently about to be released in English in a couple of days (!). Hey, it only took 28 years...

Carl-Johan Vallgren's The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred has received some attention overseas, I think, and rightly so, though his (in English still forthcoming) Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler is much better IMO; the story of the 20th century as told through the eyes of someone who has sold his soul in exchange for eternal life - very Bulgakovian.

John Ajvide Lindqvist made a huge splash with his social realist vampire tale Let The Right One Slip In a few years ago; apparently it's due for English translation sometime this year.

And while they're not my favourites, some people speak very highly of contemporary writers such as Marianne Fredriksson, Henning Mankell, Kerstin Ekman and Mikael Niemi.

Those are some of the living ones. If we go patrolling in the graveyard (while we're on the subject of vampires, I mean) we might find names like Hjalmar Söderberg's Doctor Glas, Selma Lagerlöf's Gösta Berling's Saga, Karin Boye's Orwellian Kallocain, August Strindberg's The Red Room, Eyvind Johnson's Return to Ithaca, Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist's amazing The Queen's Diadem. Some of these may only be available on dusty shelves in used book stores, though. The same seems to apply for poets like Gustaf Fröding, Gunnar Ekelöf and Nils Ferlin.
 
Nice thread.

There are quite a few Malaysia authors - though the most famous is probably Lilian Too, who is a Feng Shui author. I understand it's a good living writing about Feng Shui, being quite often top of the book charts in US and elsewhere.

Literary authors... Rani Manicka is abece's favourite book from Malaysia. Tash Aw is a Whitbread award winner. I like Chong Sheau Ching, who is also a columnist in a local daily.

There are plenty of others, though shamefully I have to admit I'm not incredibly familiar with them.

ds
 
HermioneWeasley said:
I'm from Belarus, which was part of hte soviet union until about 15 years ago, so any writers from there are fairly recent. I can't claim that anyone like Pushkin or Dostoevsky was Belarusian, they were Russian..but fortunately I can still read them in russian.
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I know the guy who was recently US ambassador to Belarus, George Krol. He's a sweetheart. They say his Belarusian is better than Lukashenko's.
 
Thanks

I'm so glad you metioned "An Englishman's Boy" I really enjoyed that a number of years ago. Great with all this feedback even for a Yankee I'm always interested in other countries authors and their works
Bzseven:) :) :D
 
I have a Norwegian friend who told me about Kristin Lavransdatter years ago. Wish me luck in finding it here in Cape Town! Perhaps one of you guys can ship me an English version? I'll gladly pay top dollar (well, top Rand, actually. ;) ) for it.

I'm thinking perhaps I'll read Hendrik Ibsen when I've got nothing else to read.. I tried Dolls House years ago and couldn't get into it at all. It bored me senseless. Oh well.

Who is Lukashenko?

I quite agree with the view held about translations. But it's a necessary evil, methinks. People like Ngugi write in their native tongue and it's translation still appeal to us Westerners. It's magical; however, it doesn't happen to every writer. If only!
 
Baddie said:
Ibsen largely founded the modern stage by introducing a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. Victorian-era plays were expected to be moral dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every drama was expected to result in a morally appropriate conclusion, meaning that goodness was to bring happiness, and immorality pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his times and shattered the illusions of his audiences.
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Baddie,

Not to refute the merits of Ibsen, but he isn't really the father of modern theatre. He was important for a short time, at the end of the 19th century, and influenced early 20th century naturalist playwrights like George Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and Bretch.

But modern theatre owes more to surrealist playwrights like Pirandello, Beckett and Ionesco (whether they're better than Ibsen is another matter, of course, as well as whether a change from realism to surrealism is any good).

--------------------------------

Portugal, like José Saramago once joked, is a country full of Nobel prize-worthy writers who will never win it because no one will ever know they exist. It's almost pointless to give names here, since most haven't been published outside Portugal:
- Vergílio Ferreira
- Miguel Torga
- Agustina Bessa-Luís
- António Lobo Antunes
- Fernando Pessoa
- José Saramago, of course.
 
I see I'm not the first Romanian to post on this thread, but I really must insist on Mircea Eliade's works. He is best know for what he wrote on History of Religions, but he also wrote literature, and I know for sure that his journals were translated in English, along with many short stories.
 
There's a lot of good Norwegian writers, but I don't know how many books are translated into other languages.

I tried searching for some on Amazon.com, but the outcome was bleak. Anyway, for the ones knowing Norwegian, Swedish or Danish I'll mention some authors and books, since the languages are fairly similar, even though Swedish are a lot different than the other two in written language.

Ari Behn is one of my personal favourites. He's married to princess Märtha, which pisses many Norwegians off, but I think he's awesome. Bakgaard is a really good book about a norwegian boy travelling to Sahara. It's slightly perverse, which makes it amusing.

Lars Saabye Christensen is probably the only person in the world who pulls off writing as many commas in a sentence as he pleases without getting bashed. Warning: if you are a writer, you will easily be affected by this and start doing it yourself. Beatles is, in my opinion, his best book. I don't know if it's to find in any other language, but I know you can get Halvbroren (The Half Brother) in English.

And just to mention some other Norwegian authors: Jo Nesbø, Linn Ullmann and Herbjørg Wassmo.
 
Yes, several books by Lars Christensen have become available in Portuguese recently. I've been thinking about giving him a try, but never actually do it. So you would recommend him? He uses a lot of commas; how so? Does he write long sentences?
 
OK. I'm the first Russian here. I dont know if you could find any books by modern Russian poets and writers but I can advice you books by some persons who are very talented.

Seventh Wife by Igor Efimov
Geographer has Drunk Away the Globe by Alekey Ivanov
Generation P by Viktor Pelevin
Gluhoman by Boris Vasiliev
True by Dmitriy Bykov
Coronation and Lover of Death by Boris Akunin
Idiot by Fedor Dostoevskiy

and two persons who are my favourite poets:
Joseph Brodskiy
Vladimir Mayakovskiy
 
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