Jhumpa Lahiri

Andre Dubus, II was an American short story writer, essayist, and autobiographer. Andre Dubus was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the youngest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family. His two elder siblings are Kathryn and Beth. His surname is pronounced "Duh-BYOOSE", with the accent on the second... syllable to rhyme with the noun "excuse." Dubus grew up in the Bayou country in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was educated by the Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that emphasized literature and writing. Dubus graduated from nearby McNeese State College in 1958 as a journalism and English major. Dubus then spent six years in the Marine Corps, eventually rising to the rank of captain. At this time he married his first wife and started a family. After leaving the Marine Corps, Dubus moved with his wife and four children to Iowa City, where he later graduated from the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in creative writing, studying under Richard Yates. He admired Hemingway, Chekhov, and Cheever. Dubus's life was marked by several tragedies.
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Richard Yates was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life. Born in Yonkers, New York, Yates came from an unstable home. His parents divorced when he was three and much of his childhood was spent in many different towns and residences. Yates... first became interested in journalism and writing while attending Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. After leaving Avon, Yates joined the Army, serving in France and Germany during World War II. By the middle of 1946, he was back in New York. Upon his return to New York he worked as a journalist, freelance ghost writer and publicity writer for Remington Rand Corporation. His career as a novelist began in 1961 with the publication of the widely heralded Revolutionary Road.
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Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize. Generally regarded as one of the world's... foremost writers of fiction, Munro writes about the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of daily life. While the locus of Munro’s fiction is her native Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov." Munro was born in the town of Wingham, Ontario, into a family of fox and poultry farmers. Her father was Robert Eric Laidlaw and her mother, a schoolteacher, was Anne Clarke Laidlaw . She began writing as a teenager and published her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," in 1950 while a student at the University of Western Ontario.
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William Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long... career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories, for which he is best known. He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer , which was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011. Tim Adams, a staff writer for The Observer, described him as "widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction". Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy as a result of his father's work as a bank official. He was educated at St. Columba's College, Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history.
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