NRK ACADEMY

February 10, 2022

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

1902–1991

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland. His father and grandfather were rabbis and he was educated at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. In 1935 he emigrated to the US and since then has worked as a regular journalist and columnist for the New York paper, The Jewish Daily Forward. Apart from some early work published in Warsaw, nearly all his fiction has been written in Yiddish for this journal. It is relatively recently that Singer’s work has been translated on any scale and that his merit, and the endurance of his writing, have been recognised by a general audience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. His publications include - A Friend of Kafka, The Seance and Other Stories.

JAMES JOYCE

1882-1941

James Joyce is a major literary figure of the first quarter of the twentieth century. He is known for his bold experiments in narrative techniques in fiction, and Ulysses is his most famous work. ‘Eveline’ is one of the fifteen stories of Dublin life that form Dubliners, first published in 1914. It is a sympathetic portrayal of Eveline, who has within her reach escape from the drudgery of her life but cannot gather enough courage to seize it.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

1927-2014

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was brought up by his grandparents in Northern Columbia because his parents were poor and struggling. A novelist, short story writer and journalist, he is widely considered the greatest living Latin American master of narrative. Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His two masterpieces are One Hundred Years in Solitude (1967, tr. 1970) and Love in The Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988). His themes are violence, solitude and the overwhelming human need for love. This story reflects, like most of his works, a high point in Latin American magical realism; it is rich and lucid, mixing reality with fantasy.