Writer Archives - Page 133 of 138

Beate Klarsfeld

Beate Auguste Klarsfeld is journalist who, with her husband, became famous for investigating and documenting Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche, among others. From the time she was about 14 years old, Beate began to frequently argue with her parents, because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era, focused on the injustices and material losses they suffered, and blamed the Russians, expressing no sympathy for other countries. Moving to Paris in 1960, she was confronted with the consequences of the Holocaust. In 1963, she married French lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was a victim of the Auschwitz concentration camp exterminations. Beate has said that her husband helped her become “a German of conscience and awareness”.

al-Khansa

Tumadir bint Amru al-Harith bint al-Sharid, better known as al-Khansāʾ, was one of the most influential poets of Arabia’s pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods in the 7th century. Born into a powerful family near Mecca and Medina, much of her work was inspired by her brothers Ṣakhr and Muʿāwiyah, who died in tribal battles. At the time, the role of female poets was to write elegies for the dead and perform them for the tribe in public oral competitions. Al-Khansāʾ won acclaim in these competitions with her work, and is widely considered as the finest author of Arabic elegies and one of the greatest and best known female Arab poets of all time. In 629, she went to Medina with a group from her clan and, after meeting the Prophet Muhammad, embraced the new religion of Islam. Some sources say she was the favourite poet of Muhammad, who wept when he heard her elegies for her brothers.

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga

Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga was a Romanian scholar, essayist, political activist and professor at the University of Bucharest.
As a student at the university, she studied law (1939-43) and literature (1944-48), later earning her doctorate in 1970. Around the time a communist regime was established in her country, she went to the Soviet Union to study at the the Gorky Pedagogical Institute (1948-49). Dumitrescu worked as an editor at Editura de Stat from 1948 to 1949, and at Editura pentru Literatură until 1957. She was hired as teaching assistant at her alma mater in 1949, rising to assistant professor in 1951, associate professor in 1963, full professor in 1971 and chairing the department of universal and comparative literature in 1975.
Having been a researcher at the George Călinescu Institute of Literary History and Theory until 1957, she became the director in 1973. From 1970 to 1982, she served as vice president for the Social and Political Sciences Academy, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1974. In 1975, she became president of the Romanian National Committee for Comparative Literature, and was on the executive board of the International Comparative Literature Association (1973-79). She edited two magazines, Synthesis and Revista de istorie și teoria literară. Among her published books were Renașterea: Umanismul și dialogul artelor (1971), Valori și echivalențe umanistice (1973), Periplu umanistic (1980) and Itinerarii prin cultură (1982).
Dumitrescu joined the Romanian Communist Party in 1966, and was a member of the party’s central committee from August 1969 to November 1974. She served two terms in the Great National Assembly, representing Bucharest districts both times (1975-85). She was awarded the Order of 23 August, fourth class, followed in 1971 by the Cultural Merit Order, second class and by the special prize of the Writers’ Union in 1986 and 1989. She was also granted the Order of Cyril and Methodius by the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in 1977, and the next year became a commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. She took the Herder Prize in 1988 and headed the Accademia di Romania in Rome (1991-97).
Late in life, she spent most of her time at the Romanian Orthodox Văratec Monastery and ultimately took the vows of a nun.

Tawakkol Karman

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman is a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist.

Addagoppe of Harran

Addagoppe of Harran was an Assyrian priestess of the moon god Sîn in the northern Assyrian city of Harran, and the mother of King Nabonidus (ruled 556–39 BC) of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Alba Roballo

Alba Roballo was a prominent Afro-Uruguayan lawyer, poet and politician, who was Uruguay’s first woman Cabinet member, first woman Culture Minister, and first woman elected to the (then collective) Municipal Council of Montevideo, Uruguay.

Diorbhail Nic a’ Bhriuthainn

Diorbhail Nic a’ Bhriuthainn was a Scottish Gaelic poet and songwriter who lived on the Isle of Luing in Scotland.

Ilse Stanley

Ilse (Intrator) Stanley was a German Jew who, working with a handful of people including Nazi Gestapo members of the Gestapo and other Jewish civilians, secured the release of 412 Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentration camps between 1936 and 1938, before the devastating events of Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938).

Olga Tufnell

Olga Tufnell FSA was a British archaeologist who worked on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) in the 1930s. She had no formal archaeology training, but had worked as a secretary for Flinders Petrie for several years before being given a field assignment. Tufnell joined James Leslie Starkey in the expedition to Lachish in 1929 and remained part of the team for years.
When Starkey was killed in 1938, the team finished the season and then closed the site in 1939. Tufnell volunteered to write up the report of the dig and spent the next 20 years researching and writing up the majority of the excavation report, with the final publication (Lachish IV) in 1957. Her work is considered the “pre-eminent source book for Palestinian archeology”.
After her return to the UK in 1939, her work was almost immediately interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, as Tufnell was recruited to the BBC Arabic radio station due to her association with the Middle East; she was also an air raid warden.
At the end of the war, Tufnell returned to her work on the report, raising controversy when she published findings that the time period between two occupational levels, Level II (before Babylonian conquest by Nebuchadnezzar) and Level III (before Assyrian conquest by Sennacherib) was likely to be in the range of 100 years, rather than a decade, as Starkey had suggested. Although most archaeologists believed Starkey’s interpretation was more likely, subsequent excavations vindicated her opinion in 1973.
In 1951, Tufnell became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which she called one of her “greatest achievements”. Once the full Lachish report had been published, Tufnell turned her focus to the study of scarabs. Although many scholars dismissed the area of scarabs and seals as “unreliable of chronology”, Olga meticulously recorded their dimensions and styles. She was also an early user of computers for measuring the scarabs, and she was due to present a paper on that use of computers just days after her death in April 1985

Madame d’Aulnoy

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was a French writer known for her literary fairy tales and for coining the term when she called her works contes de fées (fairy tales). In 1666, she was married off at age 15 to a man three times her age, the Baron d’Aulnoy. In 1669, the Baron was accused of treason by two men who may have been the 19-year-old baroness’s lovers, and her mother, the Marchioness de Gadagne. The Baron spent three years in the Bastille before he finally convinced the court of his innocence. His two male accusers were executed and the Marchioness de Gadagne fled to England. Though a warrant was served for Madame d’Aulnoy’s arrest, she escaped through a window and hid in a church when officers came to arrest her.
She may have then worked as a spy for France (and possibly spent some time in Holland, Spain, and England) before returning to Paris in 1685 (possibly as repayment for spying). Madame d’Aulnoy hosted salons that were attended by leading aristocrats and princes.
In 1699, her friend Angélique Ticquet was beheaded for having a servant shoot Angélique’s abusive husband. The servant was hanged. Mme d’Aulnoy escaped prosecution despite her alleged involvement and removed herself from the Paris social scene for 20 years.
D’Aulnoy published 12 books, including two collections of fairy tales and three “historical” novels, as well as a series of travel memoirs based on her supposed travels through court life in Madrid and London. Though her stories may have been plagiarized and invented, these stories later became her most popular works. In France and England at the time her works were considered as mere entertainment rather than factual history, a sentiment reflected in the reviews of the period. Her truly accurate attempts at historical accounts – about the Dutch wars of Louis XIV – were less successful. The money she made from her writing helped support her three daughters, not all of whom were produced during her time with the Baron d’Aulnoy .
Her most popular works were the fairy tales and adventure stories she published in Les Contes des Fées (Tales of fairies) and Contes Nouveaux, ou Les Fées à la Mode. Unlike the folk tales of the Grimm Brothers (born some 135 years later than d’Aulnoy), she wrote her stories in a conversational tone, as they might be told in salons. Many of her stories created a world of animal brides and grooms, where love and happiness came to heroines after overcoming great obstacles, though many English adaptations are very different from the original.