Freelance writer and radio presenter
excerpt “Who knows?”Paul and Jennifer locked stares. “You still want to do this, don’t you?” she asked him.“Yes,” he nodded. A minute passed.Finally David spoke. “So Paul, if you’re really going to leave, can I have your leather jacket?”★Breakfast was chaotic. At first, Ivan Nikolaevich announced to the diners that their departure would be delayed […]
Jazz with Ella
On December 27, 1831, Darwin’s voyage aboard the HMS Beagle taught English to think in processes rather than declarations. Observation replaced authority, accumulation replaced assertion, and time itself entered prose. From this journey, English learned to argue patiently, describe gradual change, and treat uncertainty as intellectual strength.
Charles Darwin Departs on the HMS Beagle – The Journey That Remade English Nonfiction
Agacée par le bruitDu vent qui souffle par rafales,Mon corps contre toi s’affale,Fourbu, alangui.Dans cette longue nuit,L’un contre l’autre blottis,Nous retrouvons l’attraitDans cet amour secretQui nous catapulteLoin du tumulteQue pourrait nous apporter,Cette nuit singulièrement agitée. Contre toi ainsi lovée,J’oublie la plainte du vent ;Je reste pleinement concentrée,Sur le chant de l’engoulevent.Mes mains s’attardent,Sur chaque centimètre […]
Dans tes yeux je revis – In your eyes I live again
Born December 26, 1891, Henry Miller shattered the boundaries of modern English prose. By challenging censorship, embracing radical autobiography, and reshaping sentence rhythm, he expanded what English could legally, morally, and stylistically express. His work transformed prose into a vehicle of personal freedom, intensity, and unapologetic subjectivity.
Birth of Henry Miller (1891–1980) – The Writer Who Forced English Prose to Break Its Restraints
Born December 21, 1917, Heinrich Böll shaped postwar English literary thought through translation. His restrained realism offered a language for guilt, conscience, and responsibility after catastrophe, rejecting heroics and abstraction. By accounting for damage rather than dramatizing it, Böll taught English prose how moral seriousness can emerge through clarity, silence, and ethical restraint.
Birth of Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) – The Conscience That Entered English Through Postwar Prose
Sea seain our minds in our souls in our veins the seaWe saw ships bringing mythic landshere in the blond sandwhere the evening wayfarers slow downWe dressed our childish loveswith wet seaweedsWe offered to the seashore godslustrous shells and pebblesMorning colors melted in waterdusk fires on the gulls’ shouldersmasts showing the immensityopen thresholds in the […]
Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume I
Born December 19, 1910, Jean Genet reshaped modern drama and literary thought in English through translation and performance. His ritualistic, confrontational language challenged realism, power, and identity, forcing English theatre and criticism to confront marginality as aesthetic force and political stance rather than subject matter.
Birth of Jean Genet (1910–1986) – The Writer Who Forced English to Speak the Language of Transgression
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