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- Img. No. 1381
- T.C. Boyle
- 2003
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1948
Thomas John Boyle was born in Peekskill, New York. He grew up in the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in widely anthologized short story Greasy Lake). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle. Boyle earned a BA in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968, after which he taught for four years at the high school in his home town where his mother worked as head secretary and his father as a janitor.
After being accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1972, Boyle served as fiction editor for the Iowa Review, and in 1977 received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988 he received a Guggenheim. Boyle has since received many literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Malamud Prize, the PEN/West Literary Prize, the Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Excellence. His short fiction has won him six O. Henry Awards for short fiction, and multiple appearances in the Best American Short Story awards. Boyle earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1974 and his Ph.D. degree in 19th century British literature in 1977.
He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, and currently lives in Santa Barbara with his wife and three children. Many of Boyle’s novels and short stories explore the Baby Boom generation, its appetites, joys, and addictions. Boyle’s themes, such as the often-misguided efforts of the male hero and the slick appeal of the anti-hero, appear alongside brutal satire, humor, and magic realism. Boyle’s fiction also explores the ruthlessness and the unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment.
Boyle’s work has been compared to Mark Twain’s for its mixture of humor and social exploration. His novels include World’s End (1987, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction); The Road to Wellville (1993); and The Tortilla Curtain (1995, winner of France’s Prix Medicis Etranger). Boyle is also one of America’s most accomplished short story writers and has published eight collections, including Descent of Man (1979), Greasy Lake (1985), If the River was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994). His short stories regularly appear in the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy. -
- Img. No. 1375
- Ian McEwan
- 2002
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
Ian McEwan
*1948
McEwan was born in Aldershot in England and spent much of his childhood in East Asia, Germany and North Africa, where his Scottish army officer father, David McEwan, was posted. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradburys pioneering creative writing course.
He has been married twice. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of The Guardians Review section. In 1999, his first wife, Penny Allen, took their 13-year-old son after a court in Brittany, France, ruled that the boy should be returned to his father, who had been granted sole custody over him and his 15-year-old brother.
In 2002, Ian McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II - the story became public in 2007. The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharpe, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharpe has the same two parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between McEwan’s parents that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan’s mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.
His first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed Ian Macabre.
These were followed by three novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s. His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about a person with de Clerambaults syndrome, is regarded by many as a masterpiece, though it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1998, he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam.
His next novel, Atonement, received considerable high acclaim; Time Magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His next work, Saturday, follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Henry Perowne, the main character, lives in a house on a well-known square in central London, where McEwan now lives after having relocated from Oxford. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005. His most recent novel, On Chesil Beach, was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children’s fiction, and an oratorio.
As of August 2007 McEwan is writing the libretto to an opera called For You, which tells the story of a composer whose sexual and professional prowess have passed their peak. It is being composed by Michael Berkeley and is set to be performed in 2008. -
- Img. No. 1449
- Armin Müller-Stahl
- 2004
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1930
Müller-Stahl was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany (now Sovetsk, Russia), the son of Editta and Alfred Mueller-Stahl, a bank teller. He was a noted concert violinist while he was a teenager. He turned to film acting in East Berlin in 1950.
He was a successful film and stage actor in East Germany, but being blacklisted by the government, he emigrated to West Germany in 1980 after protesting against Wolf Biermann’s denaturalisation in 1976. Mueller-Stahl’s talent found ample work in the West German film industry. He appeared in such films as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola and Veronika Voss (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s A Love in Germany (1984), Angry Harvest and Colonel Redl (both 1985), the latter about Alfred Redl.
Mueller-Stahl broadened his film career with his US film debut as Jessica Lange’s father in Music Box (1989). He subsequently took strong character roles in Kafka by Steven Soderbergh and Night on Earth by Jim Jarmusch (both 1991). He is also remembered for his role as the Soviet general in charge of the occupied United States in the ABC television miniseries Amerika (1987). Mueller-Stahl’s leading role in Avalon (1990) is also memorable.
Mueller-Stahl won the Silver Bear for Best Actor in the 1992 Berlinale for his performance in Utz. He received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Shine (1996). Mueller-Stahl was also in A Pyromaniac’s Love Story (1995) and the 1997 remake of the movie 12 Angry Men. Conversation with the Beast (1996) was his first film as director. In 1998, he played the German scientist and syndicate member, Conrad Strughold, in the feature film The X-Files.
In the early 2000s, Mueller-Stahl gained applause for his portrayal of Thomas Mann in a German historic film production about the Mann family (Thomas Mann, his brother Heinrich Mann, and others) called Die Manns - Ein Jahrhundertroman. In 2004, Mueller-Stahl made another rare foray into American television, guest-starring in four episodes on the television drama series The West Wing as the Prime Minister of Israel. He starred in David Cronenberg’s 2007 crime/drama Eastern Promises and has been attached to the upcoming film The International.
The year 2007 saw Armin Mueller-Stahl as an artist, when the new Brockhaus encyclopedia was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair with book covers and spines designed by him.
In 2008, he won the Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Eastern Promises.
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- Img. No. 1483
- A. L. Kennedy
- 2004
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1965 Dundee/Scottland
A. L. Kennedy is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work. Alison Kennedy lives in Glasgow. She occasionally contributes columns and reviews to UK and European newspapers and writes essays for BBC radio. A. L. Kennedy is currently an Associate Professor in Creative Writing with Warwick University, having previously taught creative writing at St Andrews University.
Kennedy performs as a stand-up comedian at the Edinburgh Fringe, comedy clubs and literary festivals. She is principally associated with The Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh. In 2007, she won a Lannan Literary Award, was awarded an honorary DLitt degree from the University of Glasgow, and her novel of that year Day was named Costa Book of the Year in the Costa Book Awards. -
- Img. No. 1450
- Amos Oz
- 2004
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1939, birth name Amos Klausner
He is an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2008 he received an Honorary Degree from the University of Antwerp. He also received the Dan David prize in 2008 for Creative Rendering of the Past.
Oz was born in Jerusalem, where he grew up at No. 18 Amos Street in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood. Roughly half of his fiction is set within a mile of where he grew up. His parents, Yehuda Arieh Klausner and Fania Mussman, were Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father studied history and literature in Vilnius, Lithuania. In Jerusalem his father was a librarian and writer. His maternal grandfather had owned a mill in Rovno, then Eastern Poland, now Western Ukraine, but moved with his family to Haifa in 1934. Many of Klausner’s family members were right-wing Revisionist Zionists. His great uncle Joseph Klausner was the Herut party candidate for the presidency against Chaim Weizmann and was chair of the Hebrew literary society at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He and his family were distant from religion, disdaining what they perceived to be its irrationality. Yet he attended the community religious school Tachkemoni. The alternative was the socialistic school affiliated with the labor movement, to which his family was decidedly opposed in their political values. The noted poet Zelda was one of his teachers. His secondary schooling took place at the Hebrew high school Rehavia.
he later said, His mother committed suicide when he was twelve, causing him repercussions that he would explore in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. He became a Labor Zionist and joined kibbutz Hulda at the age of fifteen. There he was adopted by the Huldai family (whose firstborn son Ron now serves as mayor of Tel Aviv) and lived a full kibbutz life. At this time he changed his surname to Oz, Hebrew for strength. „Tel Aviv was not radical enough,”„only the kibbutz was radical enough.” However, by his own account he was a disaster as a laborer... the joke of the kibbutz. He remained living and working on the kibbutz until he and his wife Nily moved to Arad in 1986 on account of his son Daniel’s asthma; however, as his writing career flowered he was allowed to gradually decrease his time devoted to normal kibbutz work: the royalties from his writing produced sufficient income for the kibbutz to justify this. In his own words, he became a branch of the farm.
Like most Jewish Israelis, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces. In the late 1950s he served in the kibbutz-oriented Nahal unit and was involved in border skirmishes with Syria; during the Six-Day War (1967) he was with a tank unit in Sinai; during the Yom Kippur War (1973) he served in the Golan Heights. After Nahal, Oz studied philosophy and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University. Except for some short articles in the kibbutz newsletter and the newspaper Davar, he didn’t publish anything until the age of 22, when he began to publish books. His first collection of stories Where the Jackals Howl appeared in 1965. His first novel Elsewhere, Perhaps was published in 1966. He began to write incessantly, publishing an average of one book per year on the Labor Party press, Am Oved. Oz left Am Oved despite his political affiliation. He went to Keter because he received an exclusive contract that granted him a fixed monthly salary regardless of frequency of publication. His oldest daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, teaches history at Haifa University.
Oz was awarded his country’s most prestigious prize: the Israel Prize for Literature in 1998, the fiftieth anniversary year of Israel’s independence. In 2005, he was awarded the Goethe Prize from the city of Frankfurt, Germany, a prestigious prize which was awarded in the past to the likes of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann for his life’s work. He has written 18 books in Hebrew, and about 450 articles and essays. His works have been translated into some 30 languages. In 2007, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award of Letters (received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing, Paul Auster, Mario Vargas Llosa and Claudio Magris) -
- Img. No. 1484
- Michael Ondaatje
- 2007
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1943
He was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He moved to England with his mother in 1954. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1970 he settled in Toronto. From 1971 to 1988 he taught English Literature at York University and Glendon College in Toronto.
He and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding.
His style of fiction, introduced in Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and mastered in The English Patient (1992), is non-linear. He creates a narrative by exploring many interconnected snapshots in great detail.
Although he is best known as a novelist, Ondaatje’s work also encompasses memoir, poetry, and film. His semi-fictional memoir of his Sri Lankan childhood is called Running in the Family (1982). He has published thirteen books of poetry, and won the Governor General’s Award for two of them: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979).
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter have been adapted for the stage and produced in numerous theatrical productions across North America. Ondaatje’s three films include a documentary on fellow poet bp nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, which chronicles a collaborative theatre experience led in 1971 by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille. In 2002 he published a non-fiction book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which won special recognition at the 2003 American Cinema Editors Awards, as well as a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for best book of the year on the moving image.
Ondaatje has, since the 1960s, also been involved with Toronto’s influential Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor.
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- Img. No. 1542
- Ken Follett
- 2008
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
Ken Follett
*1949
Ken Follett, the son of Martin and Veenie Follett, was born in Cardiff, Wales, and lived there until the family moved to London at the age of ten. Barred from watching movies and television by his devoutly Christian parents, he developed an early interest in reading but remained an indifferent student until he entered his teens. Applying himself to his studies, he won admission in 1967 to University College London, where he studied philosophy and became involved in leftist politics. He married his first wife, Mary, in 1968.
After graduation, in the autumn of 1970 Follett took a three-month post-graduate course in journalism and went to work as a trainee reporter in Cardiff on the South Wales Echo. After three years in Cardiff, he returned to London as a general-assignment reporter for the Evening Standard. Finding the work unchallenging, he eventually left journalism for publishing and became, by the late 1970s, deputy managing director of Everest Books. He also began writing fiction on evenings and weekends as a hobby. Success came gradually at first but the publication of Eye of the Needle in 1978 made him both wealthy and internationally famous. Each of Follett’s subsequent novels has also become a best-seller, ranking highly on the New York Times best-seller and NovelTracker.com lists; a number have been adapted for the screen.
Follett became involved, during the late 1970s, in the activities of Britain’s Labour Party. In the course of his political activities, he met the former Barbara Broer, a Labour official, who became his second wife in 1984. She was elected a Member of Parliament in 1997, representing Stevenage. She was re-elected both in 2001 and in 2005. Follett himself remains a prominent Labour supporter and fundraiser.
Follett is widely received as a talented historical/thriller author of fiction, with a long series of international best-sellers to his name.
Leaving aside a series of competent but undistinguished paperback originals written under various pseudonyms, of which The Modigliani Scandal and Paper Money are perhaps the best known, Follett’s literary career has gone through four distinct phases.
The first, and most distinguished, phase comprises Eye of the Needle and the five books (four fiction and one non-fiction) that followed it. All are variations of the classic espionage thriller, pitting one or two daring, resourceful agents against a numerous and well-equipped enemy. The settings are both geographically and chronologically diverse, ranging from World War I Europe in The Man from St. Petersburg to (then) present-day Israel, Iran and Afghanistan in Triple, On Wings of Eagles and Lie Down with Lions. Like the early works of Frederick Forsyth, another journalist-turned-novelist, Follett\\\\\\\'s early thrillers devote much attention to how things are done. The Key To Rebecca, for example, hinges on the workings of a particular type of secret code, the hero of Triple is a master of disguise, and clandestine radio transmitters play a major role in Eye of the Needle. All six books--including On Wings of Eagles, the non-fictional story of the successful attempt to rescue two American employees of Ross Perot’s company EDS from Iran after the 1979 Revolution--follow the basic conventions of the thriller genre. All six, however, use those conventions in unconventional ways: making the protagonist of Eye of the Needle a German agent, for example.
The second phase of Follett’s career was a conscious departure from the first: a series of four historical novels written in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Pillars of the Earth, the first of the four, set the pattern for the three that followed. Unlike Follett’\\\'s earlier thrillers, it featured a large cast, multiple plotlines, occasional outbursts of violence, and extensive use of historical background. Pillars, set mostly in medieval England, followed the building of a cathedral. Night Over Water was a Grand Hotel-style tale that took place aboard a transatlantic seaplane flying from Southampton to New York on the eve of World War II. A Dangerous Fortune revolved around family and business intrigue in a large family of financiers in Victorian-era London, and A Place Called Freedom took place in Britain\\\\\\\'s North American colonies around the time of the American Revolution.
Follett changed literary gears a third time in the late 1990s, with a pair of books set firmly in the present and using high technology as a plot device. The Hammer of Eden focused on the potential use of earthquakes as a terrorist weapon, and The Third Twin on the darker aspects of biotechnology. The two novels--seemingly an attempt to mine the same fictional vein as Michael Crichton--were comparatively unsuccessful. Reviewers, as well as many readers, found the characters shallow and the effort required to suspend disbelief too great.
Follett returned to conventional low-tech thrillers in Code to Zero, an espionage story pitting Soviet and American agents on the eve of America’s first satellite launch. The World War II adventures Jackdaws and Hornet Flight put Follett firmly back where he began: writing about daring agents operating undercover behind enemy lines, charged with a mission that could change the course of the war. Some critics and readers hailed them as a welcome and long-overdue return by Follett to the kind of story he writes best. Others regarded them as old wine in new bottles: rehashings of themes and situations he had treated more interestingly in his earlier work.
Barring another radical shift in his literary output, Follett’\\\'s reputation is likely to rest on his early thrillers (especially Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca) and on The Pillars of the Earth, which he himself is said to regard as his finest work.
His most recent novel is World Without End, a sequel to The Pillars of the Earth, released in October 2007. He was inspired to write this novel in the cathedral of the Spanish-Basque town of Vitoria-Gasteiz, which is why Vitoria has honored him with a sculpture in his likeness. -
- Img. No. 1540
- Richard Ford
- 2008
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1944
He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the widely anthologized story collection Rock Springs.
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford’s father died of a second heart attack in 1960.
Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University, where he also met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968. Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful level.
Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970.
Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports.
In 1982 the magazine folded; when Sports Illustrated failed to hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford’s breakout book, named one of Time magazine’s five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs
Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in Rock Springs with the aesthetic movement known as Dirty realism. This term referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—two writers Ford was closely acquainted with—as well as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.
However misleading, the term dirty realism is still applied to Ford and other writers who write about the sadnesses and losses of ordinary people. Since the Rock Springs collection, Ford\\\\\\\'s fiction, particularly the Frank BascombeThe Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land), enjoy material affluence and cultural capital not associated with so-called dirty realist style and subject matter.
Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford’s reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story, a designation he claimed in the introduction to prefer to the novella. More recently he has edited the 2007 New Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the Library of America’s two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.
In 1995, Ford’s career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Ford’s recent works include the story collections Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002). The Lay of the Land (2006) continues (and, according to Ford, ends) the Frank Bascombe series.
Ford lived for many years in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in Maine where he teaches at Bowdoin College. -
- Img. No. 1541
- Ian Rankin
- 2007
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
*1960
Born in Cardenden, Fife, Scotland, UK is a Scottish author and one of the best-selling crime writers in the United Kingdom. His best known books are the Inspector Rebus novels. He has also written several pieces of literary criticism.
Rankin’s standard biography states that before becoming a full-time novelist he worked as grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher, hi-fi journalist, college secretary and punk musician. His CV omits a stint as Literature tutor at the University of Edinburgh where he retains an involvement with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After graduating from Edinburgh University he moved to London for four years and then rural France for six while he developed his career as a novelist. He attended Beath High School, Cowdenbeath (which has recently been rebuilt).
He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Miranda and their two sons Jack and Kit. Rankin also used to live near the Commonwealth swimming pool. He has stated on a number of occasions that one of his favourite novels is Rivals by Jilly Cooper.
Rankin did not set out to be a crime writer. He thought his first novels Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek were mainstream books, more in keeping with the Scottish traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson and even Muriel Spark (the subject of Rankin\\\'s uncompleted Ph.D. thesis), and was disconcerted by their classification as genre fiction. He was reassured by Scottish novelist, Allan Massie, who tutored Rankin while Massie was writer-in-residence at Edinburgh University: who would want to be a dry academic writer when they could be John Buchan? Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels are mainly set in Edinburgh, and are major contributions to the Tartan Noir genre. Four of the novels were televised on ITV, starring John Hannah. In early 2006 Ken Stott took over in the part of Rebus, and was hailed by many fans as an ideal fit for the character.
Rankin confirmed that he will soon start work on a five- or six-issue run on the comic book Hellblazer, although the story may be turned into a standalone graphic novel instead. He talked about this at length with Simon Mayo -
- Img. No. 1385
- Martin Walser
- 2004
- 156 x 195 cm (61.4 x 76.7 in)
- Fine art print on canvas paper
- Edition of 7
- Framed in Wenge wood/no glas
- Photographed in Zürich
Martin Walser
*1927 in Wasserburg am Bodensee, on Lake Constance)
He grown up in Wasserburg. He described the environment in which he grew up in his novel Ein springender Brunnen. From 1938 to 1943 he was a pupil at the secondary school in Lindau and served in an anti-aircraft unit.
According to documents released in June 2007, he may have joined the Nazi party on the 30th of January 1944. He ended the Second World War as a soldier in the Wehrmacht. After the end of the war he returned to his studies and completed his Abitur in 1946; he then studied literature, history and philosophy at Regensburg and Tübingen. He obtained his doctorate in 1951 for a thesis on Franz Kafka under the supervision of Friedrich Beißner.
His most important work is Runaway Horse, which was not only very popular among readers, but also gained the recognition of literary critics. While studying, Walser worked as a reporter for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk radio station, and wrote his first radio plays. In 1950 he married Katharina Käthe Neuner-Jehle. His four daughters from this marriage, Franziska Walser, Alissa Walser, Johanna Walser and Theresia Walser, are all career writers; Johanna sometimes collaborates with her father. In October 1998, Walser caused controversy by introducing the phrase using Auschwitz as a moral club in his acceptance speech for the Frankfurt Book Fair’s prestigious Peace Prize. With that he accused that the Holocoust is being used to affirm demands on Germany but the pure essence of the lesson to be learned from the genocide is so somewhat abused. Ignatz Bubis, then the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused him of anti-Semitism sparking a heated public debate in Germany. This was only one of many comments made by Walser which are seen as anti-Semitic by some (Jüdisches Museum und Museum Judengasse Frankfurt am Main).