Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, an ancient, stony, half-industrialized town. His father, who worked as a carpenter and shopkeeper, was one of only 17 soldiers in his regiment to have survived the battle of Gallipoli during the First World War. From the bleak landscape of his hometown,

Dark, Dramatic, Mythic, Violent

Graham Swift seems to have little in common with his literary contemporaries. While most writers these days spatter their novels with pop culture references and play with distortions of time and narrative, Swift sets his books in a nineteenth-century context and tells good old-fashioned stories. He

Contemplative, Death, Dramatic, Paranoid, Tragic

16th century (renaissance) poetry, 17th century literature, Charming, Dramatic, Epic, Excessive, Grand, Pop

When Naguib Mahfouz serialized his novel 'The Children of Gebelawi' in Arab-language newspapers, the fundamentalist Muslim group al-Jihad promptly put a bounty on his head. Thirty years later, in 1994, the Nobel Prize-winner was stabbed in the neck outside his Cairo home. Though he lived to tell the

Dramatic, Epic, Intense, Modernist literature, Mythic