Carlos Castresana was born in Madrid in 1957. He completed his law studies there in 1979 at the Universidad Complutense. He worked among other things as a lawyer, judge, public pr osecutor against corruption, and as pr ofessor of criminal law at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. He was
Zhang Jie was born in Peking, China in 1937. She was the daughter of an elementary school teacher and grew up without a father. Contrary to her hopes, she was assigned a degree-course place in Planning Studies rather than Literature at the People’s University of Peking. After concluding her studies
Zbynìk Hejda was born in Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic in 1930. After studying Philosophy and History at the Charles University in Prague, from 1953 to 1958, he worked as a historian and then until 1968 for the city council of Prague. He lost his job as a publishing
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Ihimaera became the first Maori novelist with the publication of »Tangi« (1973). His subsequent work immediately received recognition for its lyrical representations of the tribal and rural experiences of Maori people in New Zealand. The ways in which his writing integrated Maori life, language, traditions and mythology into the predominantly
Walter Haubrich was born in the Rhineland in 1935 and studied Philology in Germany, France and Spain. After completing his degree he worked at the Universities of Mainz, Santiago de Compostela and Valladolid. Haubrich, one of the most acknowledged experts on Spain and Latin America, was Madrid correspondent to the
Walter Kempowski was born in Rostock, Germany, in 1929. He was forced to leave school and worked as an anti-aircraft auxiliary with the Hitler Youth. After the war, when he was an apprentice to a printer he ended up in in prison of US army in Wiesbaden. In 1948, on
Victoria Tokarjeva was born in Leningrad in 1937. At the age of 18 she was awarded a diploma as a pianist at the Leningrad college of music. After marrying a physicist she moved to Moscow, where she worked as a piano teacher for three years. She had started writing young
Verónica Murguía was born in Mexico City in 1960. She began studying History before deciding to pursue an art degree. For a number of years, she worked as an aerobics teacher, a banana-bread baker as well as a radio talk-show host. Today she works as a freelance writer in Mexico
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Tomaž Šalamun was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1941 and grew up in Koper, Slovenia. He studied History and Art History at the university of Ljubljana. In the years that followed, he continued his studies in Italy and France and celebrated his first success not only as a poet but
Tom Raworth was born in London in 1938. His sixth birthday, he says, he spent making mice of candle wax in an air-raid shelter. After breaking off his schooling in 1954 he managed to get through by means of odd jobs. In 1970 he got an MA after completing his
