Anniversaries, 4 April
Marguerite Duras
French author born as Marguerite Donnadieu in Gia Dinh near Saigon, Indo China (present-day Vietnam). Her mother, Marie Legrand, was a teacher and her father, Henri Donnadieu, the headmaster at the local girls' school. Marguerite had two brothers, Pierre and Paul. She was only four years old when her father was forced to return to France for health reasons. When he died shortly afterwards her mother chose to stay in Indo China. She paid for the education of her three children by playing the...
Anniversaries, 4 April
comte de Lautréamont
The Comte de Lautréamont, pseudonym for Isidore Lucien Ducasse, was a French author born in Montevideo, Uruguay, where his father was a French consular officer. His mother died in mysterious circumstances before his second birthday. There was unrest in Montevideo at the time, and when Isidore was sent alone across the Atlantic to attend school in the south of France, it is likely that he arrived with a very different experience of the world from that of his classmates. He was interested in ...
Anniversaries, 4 April
Edith Södergran
The Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran was born in St. Petersburg, but her family soon moved to the village of Raivola on the Carelian Isthmus. In 1902-08, she attended a German-speaking religious school in St. Petersburg, with students from different countries and of different creeds. In 1907, her father died in tuberculosis, and in the following year the same disease was diagnosed in the daughter. The period 1909-14 Edith Södergran spent at sanatoria in her own country and in Swiss Davos, a...
Anniversaries, 4 April
Tristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a French-Romanian poet born in the city of Moinesti, Romania, as Samuel Rosenstock. He began to use the pseudonym Tristan Tzara early on in his career. Tzara attended the University of Zurich and began to mix in avant-garde circles in the early 1900s. He was married to the artist Greta Knutson-Tzara between 1925 and 1938.
Tristan Tzara is one of the principal founders of Dada, or Dadaism, an avant-garde movement that after it emerged in Zurich in the early 1900s spread to...
Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images (1955)
Sample of authors
Innes, Hammond
Pseudonym used by the British novelist Ralph Hammond-Innes who was born in Horsham, Sussex, to Scottish parents. He attended Cranbrook School in Kent between 1927 and 1931 after which he did odd jobs, including working as a journalist. Between 1934 and 1940 he was employed at Financial News, later the Financial Times, in London. He also wrote novels to add to his income, and he published the...