Authors & Artists
Here’s a list of all the authors and artists featured on Return of a Native – along with details of all photo-essays that relate to them.
Jane Austen
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist known for her six major novels including Pride and Prejudice and Emma, which critique the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century.
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Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French realist novelist and playwright. He is best known for the series of interlinked novels and stories La Comédie humaine, (The Human Comedy) which depicts a vast slice of post-Napoleonic French life.
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Vanessa Bell
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) was an English painter and designer, known for her colourful Post Impressionist Paintings. She was an important member of the Bloomsbury Group and also the sister of Virginia Woolf.
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In Short
Stella Bowen
(1893-1947) was a writer, painter and an Australian WWII war artist. She lived mainly in London and Paris.
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Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks (1955-) grew up in Australia, later moving to America. A journalist and novelist, she has won several prizes including the Pulitzer.
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Peter Carey
Peter Carey (1943) was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and now lives in New York. He is the author of fourteen novels (including one for children), two volumes of short stories, and two books on travel. Amongst other prizes, Carey has won the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang).
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Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) was a Post-Impressionist painter often recognised as the father of Modern Art and the bridge between the Impressionists and the Cubists.
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Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a popular English writer, prolific in the genre of mystery and crime fiction. Many of her stories have been televised and filmed.
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Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist, philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist.
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Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was considered the greatest novelist of the Victorian era and a campaigner for social reform.
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Gaetano Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) was a leading Italian composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century. Lucia di Lammermoor is perhaps the most well known of his 65 operas.
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Daphne du Maurier
Daphne de Maurier (1907-1989) was an English writer whose atmospheric books were mainly set in Cornwall. Several of her novels became successful films.
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Daphne du Maurier
Daphne de Maurier (1907-1989) was an English writer whose atmospheric books were often set in Cornwall. A number of her novels and short stories became successful films, most notably Rebecca and The Birds.
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In Short
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (1802 – 1870) was one of the most popular and prolific authors in France, known for his plays and historical adventure novels such as The Three Musketeers.
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Ford Madox Ford
(1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor, particularly remembered for his novel The Good Soldier (1915).
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Patrick Gale
Patrick Gale (1962 – ) is an English novelist and screenwriter. A number of his works are set in Cornwall where he has lived since 1988.
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Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was a novelist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor.
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Winston Graham
Winston Graham (1908-2003) was a prolific English novelist, best known for his Poldark series of historical novels set in Cornwall. He also wrote other historical works, thrillers, short stories and plays.
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Kenneth Grahame
Writer Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born to a Scottish family but lived in England. His most famous book was children’s classic The Wind in the Willows.
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Graham Greene
Graham Greene (1904-1991) is regarded as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. By the time he died he had produced more than fifty works. Among them were novels, travel books, plays, film scripts, critical essays and three autobiographical works.
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Nina Hamnett
Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was an artist, illustrator and writer who was associated with the bohemian and avant-garde circles of the London and Parisian art scenes in the first decades of the twentieth century.
In Short
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, and set much of his fiction in Wessex, his fictional name for England’s South West.
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Scenes at the Fair, Thomas Hardy
The Self-Unseeing, Thomas Hardy
Why go to Saint-Juliot? Thomas Hardy Meets Emma Gifford
In Short
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American journalist, novelist and short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th century fiction.
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In Short
Augustus John
Augustus John (1878-1961) was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a time he was considered the most important artist at work in Britain.
In Short
John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) was a Romantic Poet. Despite producing just three slim volumes of poetry in his short life, the scope ranges from odes and sonnets, to epics.
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In Short
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
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Constant Lambert
Constant Lambert (1905 – 1951) was a British composer, conductor, and author. He was the Founder Music Director of the Royal Ballet and helped establish English ballet as a significant artistic movement.
In Short
Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee (1914 – 1997) was an English writer, poet and screenwater, born in the village of Slad, Gloucester. He is best known for his autobiographical trilogy that starts with Cider with Rosie.
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DH Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930) was an English writer and poet. His modernist fiction focused on the inner self and the unconscious, reflecting on the dehumanising effects of industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, instinct and and vitality.
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TE Lawrence
TE Lawrence (1888-1935) was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat and writer. The film Lawrence of Arabia was based on his wartime activities.
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Dora Maar
Dora Maar (1907 – 1997) was a French photographer and painter, and lover of Picasso.
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Julian Maclaren-Ross
Julian Maclaren-Ross, 1912 – 1964) was a British novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, screenwriter, and literary critic. He is synonymous with the bohemian world of mid-twentieth-century Soho and Fitzrovia.
In Short
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), was a writer born in New Zealand who achieved international recognition as a master of the modernist short story, despite her tragically short life.
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Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was one of the undisputed masters of twentieth century art, known for his use of colour and original draughtsmanship.
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Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan (1948) is a multi-award winning English novelist and screenwriter whose works have earned worldwide critical acclaim.
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Colin McPhee
Colin McPhee (1900 – 1964) was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is best known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali.
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Dame Nellie Melba
Dame Nellie Melba GBE (1861-1931) was an Australian operatic soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early 20th century.
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Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford (1904-1973) was an English novelist, biographer and journalist. The eldest of the Mitford sisters, she was one of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of London society between the wars.
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Claude Monet
Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founder of the Impressionist movement. He achieved international fame with his studies of light and landscape.
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Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. His essays, some of the most influential ever written, are full of personal anecdote, insight and humanity.
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Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, print maker and ceramicist, the co-founder of Cubism, who is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Her best known works explore themes of death, identity and alienation.
In Short
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for his macabre short stories and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
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Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys, CBE (1789-1979) grew up in the Caribbean before residing in Paris and London. She received the CBE in 1978 for her writing.
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Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville West (1892-1962) was an English writer and garden designer. She inspired her friend and lover Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography.
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Francoise Sagan
Françoise Sagan (1935-2004) was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Her first novel – Bonjour Tristesse – was written when she was a teenager.
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was an English Elizabethan playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the world’s greatest dramatist.
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Ali Smith
Ali Smith (1962 – ) is a an award winning Scottish author, playwright, academic, journalist and one of Britains finest writers.
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Christina Stead
Christina Stead (1902 – 1983) was an Australian novelist and short-story writer known for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations.
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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (1874 –1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, best known for her modernist writing, extensive art collecting and literary salon in the early half of the twentieth century.
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Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish essayist, novelist, poet and travel writer, famous for writing Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
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Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author who is celebrated for his 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.
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Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland and one of Britain’s leading Victorian poets.
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Colin Thiele
Colin Thiele (1920-2006) was an Australian author renowned for his award-winning children’s fiction, most notably the novel Storm Boy which has been adapted for film twice.
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Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet and writer, known for his lyrical and deeply emotional work as well as his turbulent personal life.
In Short
Violet Trefusis
Violet Trefusis (1894-1972) was an English author and socialite, mainly remembered for her passionate love affair with Vita Sackville West.
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Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short story writer and a designer of gardens and interiors. She wrote about the lives and morals of New York ‘aristocracy’ in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
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Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s.
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Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English, is one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century. She was also a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group.
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Republic of Two, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield
The Revolutionists, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen
In Short
Yuan Phai
Yuan Phai: The Defeat of Lanna (anonymous author) is a fifteenth century epic war poem about a famous battle between Siam and what is now Chiang Mai.
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Émile Zola
Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French writer in the literary school of naturalism. He is best known for his twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, a natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire.
