Category: Writers and Writing

Margaret Atwood

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood was born on this day in 1939 in Ottawa. Atwood is a prolific writer of dozens of titles, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, graphic novels and children’s books. Margaret Atwood is best known for 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel that is perhaps even more relevant today than it was when it won the Governor-General’s Award in 1985 and the Arthur C. Clark Award in 1987, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Atwood did go on to win the prestigious Booker Prize, for best English language novel, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, and was a co-winner in 2019 for The Testaments, a much celebrated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro was born on this day in 1954. Ishiguro was born in Japan, but moved to the U.K. with his parents when he was five years old. He grew up to become one of most critically acclaimed authors in the English language, winning a variety of prestigious awards including the Booker Prize in 1989 for his novel, The Remains of the Day, and, for his entire body of work, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

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Richard Wagamese

Richard Wagamese, the celebrated Indigenous Canadian writer, was born October 14, 1955. Wagamese was Ojibwe and a member of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. He was born in Ontario and lived there for much of his life. In later years he lived in British Columbia, where he died in 2017 at the the age of 61. Keeper’N Me was his debut novel, published in 1994. Wagamese was perhaps best known for his 2012 novel Indian Horse.

Stephen King

American writer Stephen King was born on this day in 1947. King has been referred to as the “King of Horror” as he has written dozens of horror novels and hundreds of horror stories. Some of his best known works include Carrie, It, The Shining, and the Dark Tower series. Many of his novels and stories have been adapted for film and television.

King’s works aren’t limited to horror. He has also written books and stories that fit it many other categories or genres. Many lovers of the films “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me.” don’t realize that these films were adapted from King’s books.

Find out more:

Stephen King.com

Fantastic Fiction

Vox: Stephen King

Anne Frank

Anne Frank was born on this day in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Her family moved to the Amsterdam in 1933, among the over 300,000 Jews who fled Germany between the rise of Hitler and the onset of WW2. Nevertheless, the Netherlands fell to the Nazis in 1940. Eventually Anne and her family went into hiding in 1942. While hiding in the “Secret Annex,” Anne would write what would become perhaps the most famous diary in history, published after the war as The Diary of a Young Girl. The Franks were betrayed, discovered, and arrested, in 1944. Anne and her sister perished in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi death camp, in 1945. Most of her family ended up numbered among the more than 100,000 Dutch Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust, although her father survived. It was he who discovered Anne’s diary and was able to have it published so that many generations may be enriched by it.

Find out more:

Anne Frank The Writer

Anne Frank House

Anne Frank Fonds (Foundation)

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer in the English language, was born on this day in 1564.

Maybe. We are not sure. In fact, there is much we don’t know about Shakespeare. Some don’t think that he wrote the plays that are attributed to him, or that he even existed,. This might not even be a picture of him. 

Learn more about Shakespeare and the debate surrounding his identity.

More importantly, take the opportunity to enjoy the plays that he wrote, (maybe?) . You can read the plays in school, but to really enjoy them to need to see them performed. Best of all, go to see the plays live and in person, to fully experience the wonder and joy of Shakespeare.