Jean Rhys, was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.
PEN Ackerley Prize is awarded annually by English PEN for a literary autobiography of excellence, written by an author of British nationality and published during the preceding year. The winner receives £3,000. In recent years, the winner has been announced at the annual English PEN summer party.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Antoinette is caught in a patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation.
The Confessions is an autobiographical book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In modern times, it is often published with the title The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to distinguish it from Saint Augustine's Confessions. Covering the first fifty-three years of Rousseau's life, up to 1765, it was completed in 1769, but not published until 1782, four years after Rousseau's death, even though Rousseau did read excerpts of his manuscript publicly at various salons and other meeting places.
André Deutsch was a Hungarian-born British publisher who founded an eponymous publishing company in 1951.
Liane de Pougy, OP, was a Folies Bergère vedette and dancer renowned as one of Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesans. Later in life she also became a Dominican tertiary.
Diana Serra Cary, known as Baby Peggy, was an American child film actress, vaudevillian, author and silent film historian. She was the last living person with a substantial career in silent films.
Ian Grant Jack was a British reporter, writer and editor. He edited the Independent on Sunday, the literary magazine Granta and wrote regularly for The Guardian.
The Left Bank and Other Stories is the first collection of short stories and literary debut of Dominican author Jean Rhys. It was first published by Jonathan Cape (London) and Harper & Brothers in 1927, and contained an introduction by Ford Madox Ford. The original subtitle of the collection was "sketches and studies of present-day Bohemian Paris."
Diana Athill was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd.
Edward Field is an American poet and author.
Beer In The Snooker Club is a semi-autobiographical novel by the Egyptian writer Waguih Ghali written in English and first published in 1964.
Hakim Abdullah Jamal was an American activist and writer. He was an associate of Michael X and wrote From the Dead Level, a memoir of his life and memories of Malcolm X. During his life, Jamal was romantically involved with several high-profile women, notably Jean Seberg, Diana Athill, and Gale Benson.
Waguih Ghali was an Egyptian writer, best known for his novel Beer in the Snooker Club. Fearing political persecution, Ghali spent his adult years impoverished, living in exile in Europe. He died on 5 January 1969, after a fatal overdose of sleeping pills taken 10 days before.
The Monkey King is the debut novel of Timothy Mo, originally published in London in 1978 by André Deutsch. It was subsequently released through other UK and US publishers – including Faber & Faber, HarperCollins, Random House/Doubleday hardcover (1980), Vintage – before being self-published by the author under the Paddleless Press imprint in 2000. Comic and ironic in style, the novel was chosen by Hilary Bailey of the New Fiction Society and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1979.
Carole Angier is an English biographer. She was born in London and was raised in Canada before moving back to the UK in her early twenties. She spent many years as a teacher, including periods at the Open University and Birkbeck College, University of London. In 2002, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Francis Guy Percy Wyndham FRSL was an English author, literary editor and journalist.
Quartet is Jean Rhys's 1928 debut novel, set in Paris's bohemian café society. Originally published by Chatto and Windus, Quartet was Rhys's first published book other than her short story collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927).
Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-1966 is a posthumous compilation of author Jean Rhys's letters, first published in 1984 by André Deutsch and from 1985 by Penguin Books.
My Blue Notebooks is a collection of passages from Liane de Pougy's diaries from 1919 to 1941. Pougy was famous in France and internationally for her beauty, her work as a courtesan, stage performer, socialite, and later member of a community of Catholic nuns. The diaries include an unusual array of socialite reporting, descriptions of debauchery, and in the end a desire for sanctity according to Roman Catholic ideals.
