Books & Authors: Award-Winning Fiction (Bo-Co)
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Boyd, William
(British, 1952– ) Boyd spent part of his childhood in Africa, which provided the setting for his first two novels, A Good Man in Africa (1981) and An Ice Cream War (1982). The former is a sprightly comedy about the misadventures of a cynical, overweight diplomat in an obscure West African state. The latter, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize, is set during the First World War in East Afr…
Bradbury, Malcolm
(British, 1932–2000) Bradbury was one of Britain's most influential post-war teachers and critics of literature. Start with his novel The History Man (1975), a witty and observant satire of university life; its hero is a charismatic firebrand whose radicalism is a cover for ferocious self-seeking. The History Man is probably the best-known example of ‘campus novel’, of …
Bradbury, Ray
(US, 1920– ) Hailing from Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury has been a full-time writer since 1943 when he began contributing horror and science stories to periodicals. There are numerous collections of these short stories, most famously in Illustrated Man (1951) in which they are described as being magically tattooed onto a traveller's body. Bradbury's reputation as a leading scie…
Bragg, Melvyn
(British, 1939– ) Brought up in Cumbria, the setting of much of his work, Bragg was educated at Oxford, becoming a broadcaster, journalist, playwright, and prolific novelist. Start with A Time to Dance (1990), in which the obsessive love of a retired bank manager for a young woman turns to corroding jealousy. A cleverly written first-person narrative, told in flashback as a ‘very lon…
Braine, John
(British, 1922–86) A Bradford lad, a librarian and a Yorkshireman by profession, Braine wrote his first novel, Room at the Top (1957), while convalescing from tuberculosis in hospital. Nothing and nobody will stop Joe Lampton, its ruthless and calculating hero, from escaping his lowly origins and achieving success, even if it means marrying a rich man's daughter he doesn't lov…
Brautigan, Richard
(US, 1935–84) Born in the Pacific North-west, Brautigan moved to San Francisco and became one of the most distinctive writers of the Hippy era during the 1960s. His playful, easy-reading style of short chapters, simple deadpan language garnished with outlandish similes and casual irony, was quickly popular through early novels such as A Confederate General From Big Sur (1964) and especially…
Breytenbach, Breyten
(South African, 1939– ) Born in the Western Cape, Breytenbach is an Afrikaner. A controversial and uncompromising figure, he has consistently spoken out against injustice in South African society. A painter, poet, and fiction writer, Breytenbach writes almost entirely in Afrikaans, his native tongue. Always experimental with language, Breytenbach's novels are dislocated and often sty…
Brink, André
(South African, 1935– ) Born in the South African free state, Brink spent much of his youth in Paris, where he became actively involved in left-wing politics. Politicized by his travelling, he returned to South Africa and began a highly successful writing career. Brink was one of a new generation of Afrikaner writers who broke with tradition by openly criticizing the ruling Afrikaner Nation…
Brodkey, Harold
(US, 1930–96) Born Harold Weintraub, Brodkey's troubled early life within his adoptive family in St Louis, Missouri, and his later bisexuality, formed the subject matter of his work. The Runaway Soul (1991), a massive novel, decades in the making, takes its form from the inner thoughts of its narrator Wiley, spanning the years 1930 to 1956, using flashbacks and interior monologues to…
Brontë, Anne
(British, 1820–49) Sister of Charlotte and Emily, Anne was educated largely at home where she grew particularly close to Emily, inventing with her the imaginary world of Gondal. Anne worked as a governess and this experience was vividly portrayed in Agnes Grey (1847) which charts the development of a young woman leaving her idyllic, close-knit home to receive harsh, disdainful treatment fro…
Brontë, Charlotte
(British, 1816–55) Charlotte Brontë was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire but was brought up in the parsonage at Haworth where her father was perpetual curate. Charlotte was educated largely at home but the periods which she spent away were to prove fertile ground for her later novels. As a child she was sent to school at Cowan Bridge, the unhealthy situation of which led to the death…
Brontë, Emily
(British, 1818–48) Emily Brontë was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, but soon moved to the parsonage at Haworth where her father was perpetual curate. Educated for the most part at home, she was a shy, introverted figure and during her brief lifetime was overshadowed by the figure of her sister Charlotte. Like her siblings, Charlotte, Anne, and Branwell, she wrote from childhood, in…
Brooke, Jocelyn
(British, 1908–66) Born at Sandgate in Kent, Brooke served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during and after the war; army life, implicit homosexuality, and his own idiosyncratic childhood, are prominent in his books. Beautifully written but often with an elegiac air of desperate melancholy, his work should be seen as imaginative memoirs, observations of an upper-middle-class social scene in…
Brophy, Brigid
(British, 1929–95) Brigid Brophy is one of the wittiest of post-war British novelists and deserves to be much better known. Her books are usually simple to read, but her ideas are subtle and sometimes require the reader to fill in the gaps. Brophy was a great fan of Ronald Firbank, and wrote a book about him (1973). She also published a study of Mozart. Start with The Snow Ball (1964), her …
Buchan, James
(British, 1954– ) Buchan, a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, is the author of six novels and two works of non-fiction. Rooted in the real world, with acute psychological portraits and thriller-like structures, his novels deal with individuals trapped by political circumstance. Issues of free will and determinism are a major theme as characters try to find personal resol…
Buchan, John
(British, 1875–1940) During the First World War, Buchan was Director of Information and later of Intelligence. He served as an MP then became Lord Tweedsmuir and ended his career as Governor-General of Canada. However, he is better remembered as the creator of Richard Hannay, hero of a series of adventure novels that blend Buchan's sense of duty, his love of country, and his own expe…
Bukowski, Charles
(US, 1920–94) Born in Germany, Bukowski was brought to Los Angeles as a small child. Equally prolific as a poet, he based his fiction on elaborating personal experience of the city's sleazy bars and rooming-houses, racetracks and blue-collar workplaces. Written for small magazines and underground newspapers, his anarchic tales were first collected as Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibiti…
Bulgakov, Mikhail
(Soviet, 1891–1940) Bulgakov trained as a doctor but devoted himself to writing after the Russian Revolution. Throughout his life he had trouble with the censors. Moving to Moscow from his native Kiev he concentrated on the theatre, especially science fiction satires, but without much success. The White Guard (1925), set in Kiev during the Russian Revolution, was his first major novel. It w…
Burgess, Anthony
(British, 1917–93) Burgess was born and brought up in Manchester, attended university there, and served in the medical corps during the war. A late-starter at fiction writing (nearly 40 when his first novel was published), he made up for it with relentless, prodigious industry—in one year alone writing five novels when he was wrongly diagnosed as having a brain tumour, in order to pr…
Burgess, Melvin
(British, 1954– ) Melvin Burgess, whose books have aroused widespread controversy, is a writer for older teenagers. He did odd jobs and wrote in his spare time for many years before having his first book, The Cry of the Wolf (1990), accepted for publication. His most famous novel, Junk (1996), is about a runaway couple who live in a squat in Bristol and become addicted to heroin. Burgess ha…
Burke, James Lee
(US, 1936– ) James Lee Burke has carved a unique niche in American crime fiction with a clutch of evocative and atmospheric novels that blur the distinction between literary and genre fiction. He began his career with four non-crime novels, the last of which The Lost Get-Back Boogie (1986) won him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 1985 The Neon Rain introduced Louisiana detective Dave Robiche…
Burroughs, William S(eward)
(US, 1914–97) William S. Burroughs attributed his longevity to heroin, the subject of his autobiographical first novel, Junky (1953), originally published under the pseudonym William Lee. This is a plainly narrated account of how the central character became addicted to heroin and his various recoveries and relapses. Its distinctive black humour reappears in full force in the hallucinatory,…
Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan)
(British, 1936– ) Born in Sheffield, A. S. Byatt is an academic as well as a popular literary novelist. Her work is often about the relationship between art and life, especially as both affect women. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), describes a young woman's efforts to escape the influence of her novelist father. These themes are developed in a series of novels that begins wi…
Cabrera Infante, Guillermo
(Cuban, 1929– ) Cabrera Infante met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the years leading to the Cuban Revolution, but left Cuba permanently in 1965. His fiction since then has been much preoccupied with the recovery of the immediate Cuban past of Infante's own youth. His most celebrated novel is Three Trapped Tigers (1965), in which the memories of a Cuban exile cast a powerful shadow o…
Calvino, Italo
(Italian, 1923–85) Born in Cuba, Calvino grew up in Italy, settling in Turin, after working for the Resistance during the Second World War. His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), was realistic. Thereafter he turned to allegory and experimentation. His status as one of Italy's greatest writers was confirmed by the acclaim which met the fantasy, The Baron in the Trees…
Camus, Albert
(French, 1913–60) Camus was brought up in Algeria before moving to France and becoming a journalist. During the war he was active in the Resistance. In his first novel, The Outsider (1942), Meursault is a young French-Algerian clerk who leads a perfectly ordinary life until he is put on trial for shooting an Arab in self-defence. He refuses to feign any of the emotions that might gain the c…
Capote, Truman
(US, 1924–84) Born in New Orleans and raised in Alabama, Capote's precocious talent won him many prizes in literary competitions. The publication of In Cold Blood (1966) aroused a good deal of controversy, dividing the critics because of its hybrid form—the fictionalizing of real events—thus coining the term ‘faction’. It is a gripping and gruesome read, a…
Carew, Jan
(Guyanese, 1925– ) Carew's 1958 novel, Black Midas, set in the Guyana hinterland, tells the story of a pork-knocker (one of those early native pioneers prospecting for gold and diamonds in the interior). Something that wears well in the book is the love-interest across race and class lines—in this case African and Indian. These tensions still ring true in West Indian society. …
Carey, Peter
(Australian, 1943– ) Carey's books range from magic realism and fantasy to historical. He writes in beautifully simple language, with great clarity. Begin with his Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988); the early sections of this huge book, describing Oscar's childhood, read like a nineteenth-century novel, but when Oscar—an Anglican clergyman who is addicted to…
Carr, J(ames) L(loyd)
(British 1912–94) Carr, although well-travelled, chose to live away from metropolitan centres in a small town in the British midlands. His novels often evoke a rural, English world where tradition is on the verge of being overthrown. Begin with A Month in the Country (1980), which was Booker shortlisted and successfully filmed. Two survivors from the First World War, Tom Birkin, an art rest…
Carter, Angela
(British, 1940–92) Carter, often regarded as an exponent of magic realism, is known for Gothic, erotically charged tales derived from folklore and myth. But she was also a feminist critic interested in sexual politics; The Sadeian Woman (1979), for instance, reinterprets de Sade as potentially liberating, and there is a polemical undercurrent to almost all her fiction. The Magic Toyshop (19…
Cartwright, Justin
(South African, 1933– ) Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa, and educated there, in the United States, and at Oxford. A documentary film-maker and travel writer, Cartwright is best known for his subtly comic and often satirical novels. Look at It This Way (1990), a story about a City broker eaten by an escaped lion in central London, is a good starting-point. In Every Face I Meet (19…
Carver, Raymond
(US 1938–88) Carver was a short story writer and poet. The son of a lumber-mill worker and a waitress, he worked as a janitor, sawmill hand, delivery man, retail clerk, and editor before becoming a full-time writer and occasional teacher of writing. In 1956 Carver married Maryann Burk, with whom he had two children. Just before his death in 1988 he married the poet Tess Gallagher. Carver su…
Cary, (Arthur) Joyce (Lunel)
(British, 1888–1957) Joyce Cary studied art in Edinburgh and Paris, fought in the Balkans before the First World War, and later travelled to Nigeria with the political service, serving in military campaigns in the Cameroons before returning to England in 1920. Aissa Saved (1932) is an account of the effect of missionaries on those they ‘save’, and Mister Johnson (1939) is a tr…
Cather, Willa
(US, 1873–1947) Willa Cather's family migrated from Virginia to Nebraska when Cather was 9 and her writing celebrates a time when women were central to the civilizing of the prairies. In O Pioneers! (1913), Cather describes the effect on Alexandra Bergson of the death of her father and the consequent need for her to become the ‘head of the family’. As a result, Alexandr…
Cela, Camilo José
(Spanish, 1916–2002) Although this prolific Spanish writer has been highly esteemed for half a century (culminating in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989), only a relatively small amount of his work has been translated into English. Two of the novels available in English stand out. La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942; translated as The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1964), h…
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand
(French, 1894–1961) ‘Céline’ was the pseudonym of Henri-Louis Destouches, who served in the First World War, sustaining head injuries, and then worked as a doctor in the poorest areas of Paris. Though his works are usually written in the first person, and reflect his war service, travels, and knowledge of the Lower Depths, Céline is no realist. Both his best-know…
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
(Spanish, 1547–1616) Cervantes wrote plays, short stories, and novels; it is for Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part I, 1605, Part II, 1615) that he is known today. Commonly praised as the first modern novel, and a comic masterpiece, Don Quixote is a lampoon on the chivalric romances of the sixteenth century; medieval soap operas ripe for Cervantes's ironic and philosophical eye. Born nea…
Chandler, Raymond
(US, 1888–1959) For many readers, Chandler's creation Philip Marlowe is the archetypal private eye. It is hard to overestimate the influence on generations of hard-boiled crime writers of the man who wrote: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ The image of Marlowe, reinforced by many film adaptations starr…
Chatwin, Bruce
(British, 1940–89) Chatwin worked at Sotheby's before studying archaeology and taking up travelling. He worked as a peripatetic correspondent for the Sunday Times, but gave this up to trek alone through the deserts of Argentina and Chile. His interest in place and in nomadic tribes is reflected in his strikingly original fiction. Start with On the Black Hill (1982), the story of two …
Chaudhuri, Amit
(Indian, 1962– ) Born in Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri studied at the universities of London and Oxford. His debut novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), received a number of awards, and established Chaudhuri among the best English-language writers from India in his generation. The deceptively simple tale of everyday life in a small Indian community, A Strange and Sublime Address is notabl…
Cheever, John
(US, 1912–82) Cheever published stories in the New Yorker from the mid-1930s onwards, gaining the reputation of a superb stylist chronicling the unease, depressions, and adulteries lurking in the lives of affluent suburban America. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) brings together five earlier collections and contains much of his best work, such as ‘The Swimmer’ and ‘T…
Chekhov, Anton
(Russian, 1860–1904) Chekhov began composing short, humorous sketches for journals while studying medicine in Moscow. Although pressured to take up more ‘serious literary work’ Chekhov stayed loyal to the short story even after he began writing plays, for which he is perhaps better known. With his subtle blend of naturalism and symbolism, Chekhov revolutionized the short-story…
Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith)
(British, 1874–1936) Born in London, after studying art Chesterton embarked early on his career as a prolific journalist and author. Begin by meeting Father Brown, Chesterton's unassumingly philosophical Catholic priest-detective. Among the five collections of his exploits are The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). These vivid and charmingly witt…
Christie, Agatha
(British, 1890–1976) Dubbed the ‘Queen of Crime’, Christie is the most successful and widely read author of detective fiction of the twentieth century. With seventy-eight novels to her name, she has only been outsold by the Bible; her play The Mousetrap has played in London's West End since 1952. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced to the…
Cisneros, Sandra
(US, 1954– ) The daughter of a Mexican father and Mexican-American mother, Cisneros has worked as a teacher to high school dropouts, a poet-in-schools, a college recruiter and an arts administrator. She is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, and essayist. Her novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), is told in a series of vignettes. It depicts the coming-of-age of a young Latino girl grow…
Clark, Mary Higgins
(US, 1929– ) Mary Higgins Clark writes gripping psychological suspense novels. While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989) is set in the glamorous New York fashion industry and involves Neeve Kearny, daughter of the former Police Commissioner, in trying to unravel the murder of gossip columnist Ethel Lambston. All around the Town (1992) finds student Laurie Kenyon accused of the murder of her profess…
Clarke, Arthur C(harles)
(British, 1917–2001) Clarke was one of the most knowledgeable science fiction writers and was at one time president of the British Interplanetary Society. He published scientific research on satellite communications and is credited with inventing the idea of the android. Clarke is probably most famous for a short story, ‘The Sentinel’, which was the basis for Stanley Kubrick&#…
Cleary, Jon
(Australian, 1917– ) Cleary has published over forty novels, ranging from historical high adventure to the detective novels featuring Inspector Scobie Malone of the Sydney police. His stories are well crafted with a strong sense of place and history, and a pleasingly dry humour. The Faraway Drums (1981) is set in India in 1911 and concerns a plot to assassinate King George V at his coronati…
Coe, Jonathan
(British, 1961– ) Cambridge-educated Coe has written about Hollywood film star Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life (1994), and his passion for film shows through in the loud characters and ingenious plotting of What a Carve Up! (1994). Like an English comic horror film it tells the family history of the Winshaws, starting with Mad Aunt Tabitha, locked away in the family home in Yorkshire sinc…
Coetzee, J(ohn) M(ichael)
(South African, 1940– ) A prolific writer of both fiction and criticism, Coetzee first won the Booker Prize for his allegorical novel, the Life and Times of Michael K (1983). A dispossessed and simple-minded coloured man, Michael K, aimlessly creeps round the devastated political wasteland of 1980s' South Africa. Age of Iron (1990) also focuses on the upheaval of the 1980s, this time…
Colette, (Sidonie-Gabrielle)
(French, 1873–1954) Colette wrote short stories and novellas, and adapted much of her work for the theatre and screen. It is often difficult to separate the autobiographical from the fictional in her writing; My Mother's House (1953) for instance, easily passes as fiction, yet is also a series of minutely observed sketches about Colette's own life, particularly of her mother. …
Condon, Richard
(US, 1915–96) Condon spent over twenty years as a publicist in the film industry before becoming a writer. This experience shows in novels that are tightly plotted and alive with vivid scenes, products of a fertile and febrile imagination. His best-known book, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), is a gripping political thriller, made into a brilliant Frank Sinatra film, in which the stepson of…
Conrad, Joseph
(Polish/British, 1857–1924) Conrad had three lives: the first as a young Pole during a period in which Poland did not officially exist; the second as a sailor for twenty years; the third as a novelist in England. He started writing in his late thirties, in English, his third language after Polish and French. Once you adjust to Conrad's rhythms and his view of the world, he is …
Conroy, Pat
(US, 1946– ) Pat Conroy is well known as the author of Prince of Tides (1986), a chronicle covering forty years in the lives of the unhappy Wingo family in South Carolina, which was filmed in 1991, with Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte in starring roles. Conroy also wrote Beach Music (1995), which tells the moving and intriguing story of Jack McCall, living in Rome with his young daughter af…
Cook, David
(British, 1940– ) Cook left school at 15, and worked as an actor before turning to writing novels and television drama. Begin with Walter (1978) which follows the conception and life of a young mentally handicapped boy in a Lancashire town in the 1930s. Walter's mother's point of view is movingly (but never sentimentally) rendered, from the courage and determination it takes t…
Cook, Robin
(US, 1940– ) Dr Robin Cook is a graduate of the Columbia University medical school and is renowned for his best-selling medical thrillers. In Vital Signs (1991) two women desperate to have children explore the brave new world of reproductive technology and encounter unethical practices and dangerous forces. In Terminal (1993) a medical student at the Forbes Cancer Center finds that unsettli…
Cookson, Catherine
(British, 1906–98) Catherine Cookson (real name Ann McMullen) was born in Jarrow in Northeast England, the illegitimate daughter of the woman she believed to be her sister. At the age of 14 she went into service, later moved south, and then began writing. She tells her life story in her first volume of autobiography, Our Kate (1969). Her novels have enjoyed immense popularity in Britain and…
Cooper, James Fenimore
(US, 1789–1851) Born in New Jersey, Cooper's early experiences at sea and on the family farm gave him contacts with Indians, settlers, and forest life along the Susquehanna river, which fed into his books. Initially he was under the influence of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances and his first successful novel, The Spy (1821), is set during the Revolutionary War period. Co…
Cooper, Lettice (Ulpha)
(British, 1897–1994) Cooper was born in Eccles, Lancashire, and educated at Oxford. She is best known for her novels set in Yorkshire, where she lived for many years. Begin with National Provincial (1938), widely considered her best work. Its unsentimental evocation of life in a northern manufacturing town captures the brooding pessimism that preceded the Second World War. The New House (19…