TCCL Celebrates: March Authors

Each month, we highlight relevant author birthdays to celebrate. In the post below, click on the author’s name to find titles by them in our catalog. Read a little bit about each author, then follow the link to learn more about them in one of our databases. NOTE: For some biography links, you may be asked to log in with your last name and TCCL cardnumber.

Khaled Hosseini (born March 4, 1965): Khaled Hosseini has been called the most famous Afghan in the world thanks to his 2003 novel The Kite Runner. A tale of boyhood friendship and betrayal set in Hosseini's native Afghanistan during its past three tumultuous decades, the book went on to become a runaway bestseller, with millions of copies sold--many of them in the United States, the author's adopted home. The Kite Runner was also made into a 2007 film, whose premiere in Afghanistan was delayed by threats of violence against its actors. "The controversy reflects that things in Afghanistan have changed to some extent, certainly in the last year or two," Hosseini said in an interview with Erika Milvy for Salon.com. "Things have become more violent. It's a more dangerous place than it was. It has slid back and there's a new element of criminality and violence there." (From Newsmakers in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Leslie Marmon Silko (born March 5, 1948): Leslie Silko is one of the foremost authors to emerge from the Native American literary renaissance of the 1970s. She blends western literary forms with the oral traditions of her Laguna Pueblo heritage to communicate Native American concepts concerning time, nature, and spirituality and their relevance in the contemporary world. Silko, of Laguna Pueblo, Plains Indian, Mexican, and Anglo-American descent, was born in Albuquerque and raised on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in northern New Mexico. As a child she attended schools administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and also learned about Laguna legends and traditions from her great-grandmother and other members of her extended family. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico in 1969 and briefly attended law school before deciding to pursue a writing career. (From Newsmakers in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.) 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Born March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of a number of South American writers who rose to prominence during the 1960s, a period of exceptional creative achievement in Latin American literature. Like Argentine writers Julio Cortazar and Ernesto Sabato, Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez worked at his craft for years before gaining international acclaim, including the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. The publication of major works by these three authors, together with the appearance of first novels by Mexico's Carlos Fuentes and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa and the acknowledged importance of such established figures as Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges and Chile's Pablo Neruda, led to the recognition of Latin American letters as a force in contemporary literature. The enthusiastic critical reception of Garcia Marquez's works, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, is usually attributed to his imaginative blending of history, politics, social realism, and fantasy. (From Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, found in our Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Virginia Hamilton (born March 12, 1936): Since the publication of her first book, Zeely (1967), Virginia Hamilton has been esteemed for her work in children's literature and young adult literature. The recipient of every major award in the field, Hamilton published more than 35 books in her lifetime. Her writing consistently addressed issues of racial identity and feminism as she explored relationships between races, genders, and children and adults. (From her biography in the African American Experience database. Read the full piece here.)

Caryl Phillips (born March 13, 1958): "My dominant theme has been cultural and social dislocation, most commonly associated with a migratory experience." Few British dramatists have been equally at home in fiction and in the theater, but Caryl Phillips is a playwright with a reputation that overlaps a variety of categories. Most of his work has been concerned with the immigrant experience of blacks in Britain, but his perspective is both historical and international, and he has applied his talent with success to drama for the stage, television, radio, and cinema. In addition, with his first two books he made a mark in the demanding form of the novel. Journalism, too, has proved a fruitful form, provoking thoughtful essays on such significant predecessors as James Baldwin. (From Contemporary Dramatists, found in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Ben Okri (born March 15, 1959): “I just knew that writing was where my own river flowed.” Novelist and short story writer Ben Okri uses nightmarish images and fantastic twists of reality to portray the bizarre social and political conditions inside his native Nigeria. Nigeria has the largest population of any country in Africa and earns billions of dollars annually from its off-shore oil, but it has not had a stable government for more than 30 years. The Nigeria Okri describes is dark and often violent and chaotic. Drawing on his childhood memories and imagination, he creates an atmosphere of an African village that lingers in the reader's mind. In his works such as Incidents at the Shrine, Stars of the New Curfew, and 1991's Booker-McConnell prizewinner The Famished Road, his characters become mixed up with supernatural elements to the extent that the real is indistinguishable from the imaginary. Okri insists that the supernatural is a real part of the world of Nigerians. He was quoted as saying: "All I'm trying to do is write about the world from the world view of that place so that it is true to the characters." (From African Biography, found in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Alice Hoffman (born March 16, 1952): Best-selling American author Alice Hoffman was known for writing fiction which brought together fantasy and realism, and featured myths woven into everyday life. Her books sold millions of copies worldwide, included more than 100 foreign editions, and were translated into at least 20 languages. In such popular novels as At Risk, Practical Magic, The Story Sisters, and The Dovekeepers, Hoffman often focused on domestic issues in tightly knit, well-crafted, fast-moving plots, well-blended structure, and intense imagery. Her characters survive the worst that life can throw at them and move on with only a sense of hope as a guide. (From Newsmakers, found in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Toni Cade Bambara (born March 25, 1950): Toni Cade Bambara was a writer, novelist, filmmaker, and critic who was an important figure in the Black Power and Black Arts movements. She was the editor of the book The Black Woman (1970), which helped to advance a black feminist agenda. (From her biography in the African American Experience database. Read the full piece here.)

Flannery O'Connor (born March 25, 1925): Flannery O'Connor 's life is best summarized in Robert Fitzgerald's introduction to Everything That Rises Must Converge. As friend and literary executor, Fitzgerald writes of her with candor and love: "She was a girl who started with a gift for cartooning and satire, and found in herself a far greater gift, unique in her time and place, a marvel." That gift, of course, was storytelling. She wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories and the critical response to her work has been extraordinary. Since her death in 1964, eleven books of criticism have been published, as well as two collections of essays and a major bibliographical study. In little more than two decades since her reputation began to develop in the mid-1950s, no fewer than three hundred critical essays have appeared in journals. (From Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, found in the Biography in Context database. Read the full piece here.)

Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950): Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez first came to the attention of the reading public with How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), a collection of stories that tell about a family’s emigration to New York City from the Dominican Republic to escape the horrors of a dictatorship. A distinguished poet and novelist, her work can be viewed as semi-autobiographical, bridging the cultural realms of Caribbean and North American culture, and as a testimonial to a variety human experience that is found among all people. (From her biography in the Latino American Experience database. Read the full piece here.)