BIOGRAPHY

V. S Naipaul

Nobel Laureate V. S Naipaul(17August 1932 – 11 August 2018)
Famous Indian author V.S Naipaul passed away on Saturday at the age of 85.
He died at his London home.
Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, on 17 August 1932.
Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
He published more than thirty books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some fifty years.
Naipaul moved to London in 1954.
He appeared on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.
He spend his last years with his second wife far away from Trinidad.
Best known novel A Bend in The River.
His works covered diverse subjects ranging from history, culture, colonialism, politics etc.

Girish Raghunath Karnad

Girish Raghunath Karnad was born in Matheran, in present-day Maharashtra, India in 1938.
His family moved to Dharwad in Karnataka when he was fourteen, where he grew up with his two sisters and a niece.
He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and statistics from Karnataka Arts College, Dharwad.
After graduation, he went to England and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Earned his Master of Arts degree in philosophy, political science and economics.
Karnad was elected as the President of the Oxford Union in 1962–63.
He worked in Oxford University Press, Chennai for seven years (1963–70) and then resigned to take to writing full-time.
In Madras he was involved in a local amateur theatre group, The Madras Players.
During 1987–88, he was a visiting professor at University of Chicago.
He served as director of the Film and Television Institute of India from 1974 to 1975.
He was also the chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi from 1988 to 1993.
He served as director of the Nehru Centre and as Minister of Culture, in the Indian High Commission, London (2000–2003).
Karnad is known as a playwright. His plays, written in Kannada, have been translated into English and some Indian languages.
Yayati was published in 1961, when he was 23 years old. His next work was Tughlaq (1964).
His Hayavadana (1971) was based on a theme drawn from The Transposed Heads, a 1940 novella by Thomas Mann, which is originally found in the 11th-century Sanskrit text Kathasaritsagara.
Naga-Mandala (1988) was brought him the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for the Most Creative Work of 1989.
Karnad made his acting as well as screenwriting debut in a Kannada movie, Samskara (1970).
In television, he played the role of Swami’s father in the TV series Malgudi Days (1986–1987), based on R. K. Narayan’s books.
He also hosted the science magazine Turning Point on Doordarshan, in the early 1990s.
He made his directorial debut with Vamsha Vriksha (1971), based on a Kannada novel by S. L. Bhyrappa. It won him National Film Award for Best Direction along with B. V. Karanth.
Many of his films and documentaries have won several national and international awards.
He provided the voice of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, in the audiobook of Kalam’s autobiography by Charkha Audiobooks Wings of Fire.
He got Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1972, Padma Shri in 1974, Padma Bhushan in1992, Sahitya Academy award in 1994 and Gyanapith Award in 1998.
The plays of Karnad explored folklore, mythology and history and said to be a reflection of the struggles and challenges of contemporary life.
Karnad Died On 10 June2019.

Robert Louis Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894)

He is a 19th century Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer.
His notable works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses.
He is currently ranked as the 26th-most-translated author in the world.
Stevenson was born at Edinburgh, Scotland.
Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a prosperous civil engineer, and his wife, Margaret Isabella Balfour.
Stevenson developed a desire to write early in life, having no interest in the family business of lighthouse engineering.
He was often abroad, usually for health reasons.
His first printed work is The Pentland Rising.
During his years at the university he rebelled against his parents’ religion and set himself up as a liberal bohemian who abhorred the alleged cruelties and hypocrisies of bourgeois.
Stevenson traveled often, and his global wanderings contributed to his fiction.
He was often abroad, usually for health reasons.
His first literary volume, An Inland Voyage published at the age of 28.
An Inland Voyage contains his trip from Antwerp to northern France.
It was followed by a companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879).
This period produced the humorous essays of Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881), which were originally published from 1876 to 1879 in various magazines.
Stevenson’s first book of short fiction is New Arabian Nights (1882).
He met the woman who would become his wife, Fanny Osbourne, in September 1876.
She was a 36-year-old American who was separated and had two children.
The two married in 1880, and remained together until Stevenson’s death in 1894.
Stevensons took a three-week honeymoon at an abandoned silver mine in Napa Valley, California, from that travel emerged the work The Silverado Squatters (1883).
Stevenson’s other short stories are Thrawn Janet (1881), The Treasure of Franchard (1883) and Markheim (1885).
He suffered from hemorrhaging lungs. While in this bedridden state, he wrote some of his most popular fiction, most notably Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Black Arrow (1888).
Stevenson died of a stroke on December 3, 1894, at his home in Vailima, Samoa.
He was buried at the top of Mount Vaea, overlooking the sea.