Contemporary World Literature

Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. His first novel, Things Falls Apart, became a classic of international literature and required reading for students worldwide. He also authored four subsequent novels, two short-story collections, and numerous other books. He was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and, for more than 15 years, was the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. In 2007, Achebe was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement. He died in 2013.Isabel Allende nació en Perú donde su padre era diplomático chileno. Vivió en Chile entre 1945 y 1975, con largas temporadas de residencia en otros lugares, en Venezuela hasta 1988 y, a partir de entonces, en California. Inició su carrera literaria en el periodismo en Chile y en Venezuela. Su primera novela, La casa de los espíritus, se convirtió en uno de los títulos míticos de la literatura latinoamericana. A ella le siguieron otros muchos, todos los cuales han sido éxitos internacionales. Su obra ha sido traducida a treinta y cinco idiomas. En 2010, fue galardonada con el Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile, y en 2012, con el Premio Hans Christian Andersen de Literatura por su trilogía El Águila y el Jaguar.*******************************Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna, Stories of Eva Luna, Of Love and Shadows, and Paula. Her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages and have sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. She lives in California. Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth, and News of a Kidnapping. He died in 2014.Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. His nearly forty novels and hundreds of short stories range from re-imaginings of ancient myths to subtle commentaries on contemporary Egyptian politics and culture. Of his many works, the most famous is the Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957), which focuses on a Cairo family through three generations, from 1917 until 1952. In 1988, he was the first writer in Arabic to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in August 2006. V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, A Turn in the South, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.