Category Archives: Literary Biography
The Evolution of Gerald Durrell
Guest post by Mary Sanders Pollock When I saw My Family and Other Animals on a bookstore shelf thirty years ago, I had to have it. I grew up on a farm, in a large, vociferous family, and the resonance with my own life was obvious. It also turned out to be one of the… Read More »
Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women
Guest post by Marion Sherwood The Tennyson women were Alfred Tennyson’s forebears – the poet’s paternal grandmother, Mary Tennyson (1753-1825), her daughters Elizabeth Russell (1776-1865) and Mary Bourne (1777-1864), and her daughter-in-law Frances Tennyson, later Tennyson d’Eyncourt (1787-1878). The women were an inseparable and influential part of the poet’s early life until he left Lincolnshire… Read More »
Who was Alice Dunbar-Nelson?
While sitting in a classroom at Dillard University of New Orleans in the 1990’s, I met Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935). She, as we would say back then, “rocked my world.” Nearly one hundred years removed from the characters in her first collection, Violets and Other Tales, Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans was not a place that I knew.… Read More »
Opening a Window on a Literary Giant: On Writing Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation
This post was originally published at the LSE Review of Books and is reproduced here with permission. As Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka publishes his first novel in 48 years, Bola Dauda and Toyin Falola offer a window on the literary giant, reflecting on their new book, Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation. There are twice as many works on… Read More »
Teffi and Her Daughters
Guest post by Edythe Haber “What do you think – will you be able to go and eat soupe à l’oignon to wildly celebrate your birthday?” Valeria Grabovskaya wrote her mother, the Russian émigré writer Nadezhda Teffi, in April, 1952. Valeria (more informally, Valya), a resident of London, did indeed come to Paris to be… Read More »
The Biographical Novel and the Creative Art of Contemporary Living
Guest post by Michael Lackey Because Kevin Barry’s biographical novel Beatlebone is about John Lennon, one could wrongly assume that it provides an accurate picture of the Beatles’ lead singer. But what readers actually get is Barry’s vision of life and art, and he merely uses Lennon in order to achieve his artistic goal. As… Read More »
The Greatest Literary Moustaches!
It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set… Read More »
In Conversation with John Schad: Walter Benjamin Revealed
John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster and author of our new fictional narrative The Late Walter Benjamin. 'Set partly in Watford and partly in the haunted wing of the English language' (Ian Macmillan, on BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb'), this documentary novel juxtaposes the life and death of Walter… Read More »
Nine Lives of William Shakespeare – Out Now!
With the weekend fast approaching, I thought I'd offer up a quick (but enthusiastic) suggestion for anyone looking for some stimulating weekend reading. Here at Continuum, we have just published a book that, for me personally, just might be one of the highlights of our publishing year: Graham Holderness's Nine Lives of William Shakespeare. Famously,… Read More »