Javier Marías

Javier Marías, considered of one Spain’s greatest novelists, was born in Madrid in 1951. His father was the philosopher Julián Marías, who was persecuted for opposing the dictator Francisco Franco.

The Paris Review has described Javier Marías as a “literary and intellectual sensation” whose novels, short stories, essays and translations have been widely read. His work has been translated into forty-two languages. He was hailed by The New Statesman as "a master of the novel form" after the publication of his most recent novel, Thus Bad Begins.

Marías wrote his first novel at the age of 17, and his second one was published before he turned 21. Titled Travesía del horizonte (Voyage Along the Horizon), it is an adventure novel about a journey to Antarctica.

As the Paris Review notes in an introduction to an interview with Marías, despite his precocity, Marías refrained from writing another novel for six years after he graduated in English Literature from Complutense University, and instead focussed on translating writers such as William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, John Updike, Thomas Hardy, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and William Shakespeare. In 1979, he was awarded a National Award in Spain for his translation of Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

In the mid-1980s, he taught at the University of Oxford, where his novel All Souls is set. “In that novel, Marías lampoons life among the Oxford dons and sympathetically portrays the writer John Gawsworth, who inherited the title of King of Redonda, a small island off of Antigua. He runs a small publishing house named Reino de Redonda."

Marías’s experiences of being a translator and teacher have fundamentally impacted his writing, and all of his protagonists since 1986 have been translators and interpreters of various kinds.

"The publication of All Souls led to Marías being named the new king of Redonda, a title he still holds today,” notes the Paris Review introduction. His seventh novel, A Heart So White, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award jointly with the translator of the novel, Margaret Jull Costa. It concerns, as a review by Samantha Schnee on Words Without Borders puts it, “...the commonplace yet peculiar institution of marriage and all its attendant secrets and betrayals.”

Between 2002 and 2007, Marías published the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy. In a review in the New York Times, Larry Rother says the trilogy is, “...essentially a rumination on several of the Really Big Themes that tend to captivate great writers: love and death, power and violence, and, above all, betrayal, loyalty and deceit, both personal and at the level of the state.” He was awarded the prestigious Prix Formentor in 2003.

Marías's translated English works are: All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, When I Was Mortal, Dark Back of Time, The Man of Feeling, Voyage Along the Horizon, Written Lives, the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (Fever and Spear, Dance and Dream, and Poison, Shadow and Farewell), Bad Nature, While the Women Are Sleeping, The Infatuations, and Thus Bad Begins.

Adunis

Adunis is the pseudonym of the Syrian poet, translator and essayist Ali Ahmad Said Esber.

Born in 1930 in western Syria, the boy who could not go to school in his early years is now one of the most influential and admired poets in the world. In a profile in The Guardian, Maya Jaggi calls him "the greatest living poet of the Arab world."

The story of how Adunis managed to go to school is remarkable: taught by his father to read and memorise poetry, the 14-year-old Adunis recited a poem to the President of Syria when the latter was visiting a town nearby. When the president asked him what he wanted, he requested to go to school. Three years after this incident, at the age of 17, he named himself Adunis.

Adunis published his first collection of poetry in 1950, just as he was joining the Syrian University to study law and philosophy. A year or so after graduating, he was imprisoned for his membership to the progressive Syrian Socialist National Party. Eventually, he moved to Beirut, where he got a doctoral degree in Arabic literature, and cofounded two literary journals – Majallat Sh’ir and, later, Mawaqif. Majallat Sh’ir published experimental poetry, and became intensely influential. He later received a scholarship to study in Paris.

After years of teaching in Lebanon, he fled to Paris in 1980 away from the civil war in Lebanon.

“Breaking with the tradition of formal structure in Arabic poetry, Adonis experiments with free verse, variable meters, and prose poetry as he engages themes of exile and transformation, in a voice at once playful and prophetic,” says a profile of the poet's on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

It adds: “Adonis is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Adonis: Selected Poems (2010, translated by Khaled Mattawa), Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs (2008), If Only the Sea Could Sleep (2002), and The Blood of Adonis (1971), which won the International Poetry Forum’s Syria-Lebanon Award. Adonis is also the author of the seminal work An Introduction to Arab Poetics (2003),” it adds.

Adunis is particularly known for his mastery of the qasidat al-nathr (the prose poem). An Al Jazeera profile of him says, “He has an immense talent and restless spirit, coupled with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Arabic tradition, a mastery of its poetics and from the outset, an openness to modern, especially French, poetry – all of which put him in a unique position to make a broad and deep impact on Arabic literary culture.”

The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is Adunis’s third collection of poetry, in which he places the 11th century icon Mihyar in contemporary Damascus. A Publishers Weekly review of the collection said, “The availability in English of this seminal, startling, volatile, founding work of Arabic-language modernism is a welcome literary event.”

Adunis has won a number of awards, including the International Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, the National Poetry Prize in Beirut, the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Goethe medal, and the Prix Méditerranée-Etranger.

Don de Lillo

Don DeLillo, the author of White Noise, was born in 1936 to a working class Italian Catholic family. He grew up in Molise, an Italian-American neighbourhood in the Bronx in New York City.

He started writing in his late teens, and said in an interview that he had a “personal golden age of reading” in his 20s and early 30s, after which he began to write even more seriously. He published his debut novel, titled Americana, in 1971. The introduction to an interview with DeLillo in The Paris Review describes his early novels and the reception they received:

“After Americana the novels poured out in a rush: five more in the next seven years. End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), and Running Dog (1978) all received enthusiastic reviews. They did not sell well. The books were known to a small but loyal following.”

DeLillo came into wider public acclaim following the publication of The Names (1982) and White Noise (1985). His 1988 novel, Libra – a historical novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy – was a bestseller. It is widely agreed that it is White Noise, a novel about a professor of Hitler studies in a Midwestern town, that earned DeLillo his wide fame. It won him the National Book Award for Fiction.

DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner award for his novel Mao II, about which he said in his interview with The Paris Review: “In Mao II I thought about the secluded writer, the arch individualist, living outside the glut of the image world. And then the crowd, many kinds of crowds, people in soccer stadiums, people gathered around enormous photographs of holy men or heads of state. This book is an argument about the future. Who wins the struggle for the imagination of the world?”

In 1997, DeLillo published Underworld to great acclaim. It was a bestseller, and was nominated for the National Book Award. In a review, Martin Amis said: “Underworld may or may not be a great novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist.”

“Underworld is the work of a writer wired into contemporary America from the ground up, spookily attuned to the weird vibrations of popular culture and the buzz of everyday, ordinary conversations on bus and subway,” said an article about the novel in The Guardian.

DeLillo followed up on Underworld with The Body Artist in 2001 and Cosmopolis in 2003. The latter, a modern adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, received mostly negative reviews by critics. In 2007, he wrote Falling Man, about the impact of 9/11 on one family.

He published Point Omega, his fifteenth novel, in 2010. He received the St Louis Literary Award the same year, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. De Lillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in 2012.

DeLillo has also written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and The Word For Snow (2007).

His latest novel, Zero K, was published in 2016. In it, the billionaire Ross Lockhart wants to achieve immortality for himself and his terminally ill wife through the process of cryopreservation. “All the themes that have animated Mr DeLillo’s novels over the years are threaded through Zero K – from the seduction of technology and mass media to the power of money and the fear of chaos,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in a New York Times review of the novel.