Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces". She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lynn Coady is a Canadian novelist and journalist.
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels. For four different books published 1975-1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of three people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest monetary prize in children's literature. Also for her body of work she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2007 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 2013. She was the second U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, serving 2010 and 2011.
The Good Earth is a novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a Chinese village in the early 20th century. It is the first book in a trilogy with Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. The realistic and sympathetic depiction of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-lan helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.
Iris Shun-Ru Chang was an American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography, Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta is a 1979 science fiction novel by Doris Lessing, and is the first book in her five-book Canopus in Argos series. It was first published in the United States in October 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, and in the United Kingdom in November 1979 by Jonathan Cape. Shikasta is also the name of the fictional planet featured in the novel.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 22 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Breathing Lessons winning the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail," and her "rigorous and artful style" and "astute and open language."
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
Wycliffe's Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of John Wycliffe. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395. These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and chief cause of the Lollard movement, a pre-Reformation movement that rejected many of the distinctive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In the early Middle Ages, most Western Christian people encountered the Bible only in the form of oral versions of scriptures, verses and homilies in Latin. Though relatively few people could read at this time, Wycliffe's idea was to translate the Bible into the vernacular, saying "it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ's sentence".
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer.
Sarah Trimmer was a writer and critic of 18th-century British children's literature, as well as an educational reformer. Her periodical, The Guardian of Education, helped to define the emerging genre by seriously reviewing children's literature for the first time; it also provided the first history of children's literature, establishing a canon of the early landmarks of the genre that scholars still use today. Trimmer's most popular children's book, Fabulous Histories, inspired numerous children's animal stories and remained in print for over a century.
Peony is a novel by Pearl S. Buck first published in 1948. It is a story of China's Kaifeng Jews.
Maurice Leitch is an author born in Northern Ireland. Leitch's work includes novels, short stories, dramas, screenplays and radio and television documentaries. His first novel was The Liberty Lad, published in 1965. His second novel, Poor Lazarus was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1969, and Silver's City won the Whitbread Prize in 1981.
The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is a historic home in Hillsboro, West Virginia where American writer Pearl S. Buck was born. The home now serves as a museum offering guided tours. The site also includes a carpentry shop and barn with over 100 historic farm and woodworking tools, and the log home of Buck's father's family, the Sydenstrickers, which was moved from Greenbrier County.
Wena Poon is a lawyer and novelist based in the United States. She writes English-language fiction. Her work has been seen by academics in the UK, US and Singapore as representative of the transnationalism of her generation.
Absalom Andrew Sydenstricker was an American Presbyterian missionary to China from 1880 to 1931. The Sydenstricker log house at what later became the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace in Hillsboro, West Virginia, was Absalom's early childhood home. His sister Elizabeth Sydenstricker Hughart married and moved to Illinois, she had a daughter named Sarah Ward. Elizabeth was buried in Charleston, Illinois.
The Exile is a memoir/biography, or work of creative non-fiction, written by Pearl S. Buck about her mother, Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker (1857–1921), describing her life growing up in West Virginia and life in China as the wife of the Presbyterian missionary Absalom Sydenstricker. The book is deeply critical of her father and the mission work in China for their treatment of women. Buck also traces the arc of her mother's disillusionment with religion. The success of the book led Buck to write a parallel memoir of her father, Fighting Angel, New York: John Day, 1936.
Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul (1936) is a memoir, sometimes called a "creative non-fiction novel," written by Pearl S. Buck about her father, Absalom Sydenstricker (1852–1931) as a companion to her memoir of her mother, The Exile.
John Lossing Buck (1890–1975) was an American agricultural economist specializing in the rural economy of China. He first went to China in 1915 as an agricultural missionary for the American Presbyterian Mission and was based in China until 1944. His wife, whom he later divorced, was Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973).
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.
