Philip Roth

Milan Kundera ; born 1 April 1929 is the Czech Republic's most recognised living writer. Of Czech origin, he has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981. Having written in both Czech and French, he revises the French translations of all his books; these... therefore are not considered translations but original works. Kundera is best known as the author of works such as The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions. Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice, 6 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera , once a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.
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Aharon Appelfeld is an Israeli novelist. Appelfeld was born in the former town of Zhadova or Sadhora , now part of Czernowitz, Bucovina, Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian army invaded his hometown and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his... father to a Nazi concentration camp in Romanian/Axis-controlled Transnistria, sharing the same fate as Paul Celan's parents. He escaped and hid for three years before joining the Soviet army as a cook. After World War II, Appelfeld spent several months in a displaced persons camp in Italy before immigrating to Palestine in 1946, two years before Israel's independence. He was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. The father had been sent to a ma'abara in Be'er Tuvia. The reunion was so emotional that Appelfeld has never been able to write about it. In Israel, Appelfeld made up for his lack of formal schooling and learned Hebrew, the language in which he began to write. His first literary efforts were short stories, but gradually he progressed to novels.
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Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man , his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in... Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. Levi was born in Turin at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare was arranged by Rina’s father. On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto where Primo Levi was to live for almost his entire life.
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Jerome David "J. D." Salinger was an American author, best known for his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye , and his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980. Raised in Manhattan, Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary... school, and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. Salinger published his first stories in Story magazine which was started by Whit Burnett. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye, an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year. The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny: Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently.
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