Documents for "Asian Literature: Biographies":

• Abe, Kobo pseud. of Kimifusa Abe, 1924-93, Japanese novelist and dramatist. Although Abe trained as a doctor, he never practiced medicine. Often compared to Kafka , he treated the contemporary human predicament in a realistic yet symbolic style. His minute descriptions of surrealistic situations often lend his works a nightmarish quality. Among Abe's novels...

• Abu al-Ala al-Maarri 973-1057, Arab freethinking poet. He was born and lived most of his life in Maarrah, S of Aleppo. He was blind from childhood. Brilliantly original, he became one of the literary reformers who...

• Abu al-Faraj Ali of Esfahan 897-967, Arabic scholar from Iran. He is mainly known for his invaluable Kitab al-Aghani (book of songs), which provides detailed information about the culture and social life of medieval Islam....

• Abu Nuwas c.750-c.810, Arab poet, b. Ahvaz, Persia. He spent most of his life in Baghdad. High in favor with the caliphs Harun ar-Rashid and Amin, he lived a courtier's life; his exquisite lyric poetry...

• Abu Said ibn Abi al-Khair 967-1049, Persian poet, a Sufi and a dervish. He was the first to write rubaiyat (quatrains) in the Sufistic strain that Omar Khayyam made famous.

• Abu Tammam Habib ibn Aus c.805-c.845, Arab poet, compiler of the Hamasa. His poems of valor, often describing historical events, are important as source material.

• Ah Cheng pseud. of Zhong Acheng, 1949-, Chinese writer and painter. His father, the film critic Zhong Dianfei, was forced by the Communist government to sell his library of Chinese and Western classics, which Ah Cheng secretly...

• Ai Ch'ing or Ai Qing , pseud. of Chiang Hai-ch'eng or Jiang Haicheng, 1910-96, Chinese poet. After studying painting in France (1929-32), he returned to China where he wrote modernist poetry in flamboyant free verse that showed the influence of the Soviet poet Mayakovsky. He was active in Communist literary circles in the 1940s and 50s. From 1958, following the anti-intellectual campaign of 1957, until 1975, he was detained in state farms. He returned to writing...

• Ai Qing see Ai Ch'ing.

• Akutagawa, Ryunosuke pseud. of Chōkōdō Shujin , 1892-1927, Japanese author. One of Japan's finest short-story writers, he derived many of his tales from historical Japanese sources, but told them with psychological insights in an...

• Amru al-Kais fl. 6th cent., Arabic poet. His verse, like much of the poetry of the pre-Islamic period, is intensely subjective and stylistically perfect. He was esteemed by Arabs as the great model for erotic...

• Attar, Farid ad-Din see Farid ad-Din Attar.

• Ba Jin or Pa Chin , pseud. of Li Yaotang (also Li Feigan), 1904-2005, one of China's most acclaimed modern novelists, b. Chengdu. Born into a wealthy family, he received a broad education in China, graduating in...

• Basho (Matsuo Basho) , 1644-94, Japanese poet, critic, and essayist of the early Edo period. His literary name, Basho, is derived from the plantain trees [ basho ] near a hut built for him by a disciple. Basho played a central role in the development of haiku. He composed stanzas of haikai no renga (a sequence of linked verses, usually by a group of poets), whose opening, and most important, stanza ( hokku ) was later separated as the verse form haiku. A master of hokku and the integration of verses in a sequence, Basho imbued what was a social pastime with the spirit of Zen , creating a serious literary form capable of profound artistic expression. His poetry is noted for its sensitive exploration of nature of beauty, loneliness, suffering, and death. His later years...

• Bhattacharya, Bhabhani 1906-, Indian novelist, journalist, and translator. Bhattacharya was educated in India and England and has taught and traveled in many parts of the world. The themes of his novels, written in...

• Bidpai or Bidpay , supposed name of the author of the fables of the Panchatantra. The name first appears in an Arabic version of these fables—hence they are called the fables of Bidpai. The word...

• Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 1838-94, Indian nationalist writer, b. Bengal. He popularized a Bengali prose style that became the vehicle of the major nationalist literature of the region. Born a Brahman, he received an...

• Chiang Hai-ch'eng see Ai Ch'ing.

• Chikamatsu, Monzaemon 1653-1725, the first professional Japanese dramatist. Chikamatsu wrote primarily for the puppet stage in the Tokugawa shogunate. His literary work is divided into historical romances ( jidaimono ) and...

• Chokodo Shujin see Akutagawa, Ryunosuke.

• Chou Shu-jen see Lu Xun.

• Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish 1877-1947, art historian, b. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Raised in London by an English mother, he returned to Ceylon in his early 20s. After 1917 he became the first keeper of Indian and Islamic arts...

• Darwish, Mahmoud 1941-, widely considered the Palestinian national poet, b. Barwa, Palestine (now in Israel). He was born to middle-class Sunni Muslim farmers, who were displaced when soldiers from the newly formed...

• Dazai, Osamu pseudonym of Shuji Tsushima , 1909-48, Japanese novelist. Considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th-century Japan, Dazai was noted for his ironic and gloomy wit, his obsession with suicide, and his brilliant...

• Enchi, Fumiko 1905-86, Japanese novelist and literary critic. The daughter of a well-known Japanese literary scholar, she first wrote for the theater, later turning to novels and short stories. Enchi's work...

• Endo, Shusaku 1923-1996, one of the finest 20th-century Japanese novelists, b. Tokyo. Baptized a Roman Catholic at 11, he is often compared to Graham Greene for his deep concern with religion and moral behavior. Endo studied French literature at the Univ. of Lyon from 1950 to 1953, when he returned to Japan and began publishing novels and stories...

• Farid ad-Din Attar 1142?-1220?, b. Nishapur, Persia, one of the greatest Sufi mystic poets of Islam. His masterpiece is the Mantiq ut-Tair (The Conference of the Birds), a long allegory of the soul's search for divine...

• Firdausi or Ferdowsi , c.940-1020, principal Persian poet, author of the Shah Namah [the book of kings], the great Persian epic. His original name was Abul Kasim Mansur; he is thought to have been born of a yeoman family of Khorasan. He received a thorough education in Muslim...

• Fujiwara Teika 1162-1241, Japanese poet and literary theorist of the early medieval period. Son of the poet Shunzei, Teika ranks among the greatest of Japanese poets. Despite several setbacks occasioned by the...

• Gao Xingjian 1940-, Chinese-French novelist and playwright, b. Ganzhou. He earned (1962) a degree in French in Beijing and embarked upon a literary life, which was cut short by the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and six years of forced farm labor. During this period he destroyed all of his early work, fearing imprisonment. Upon his release, Gao resumed writing, but again fell afoul of the...

• Guo Moruo or Kuo Mo-jo , 1892-1978, Chinese writer and scholar. He co-founded the Creation Society, which promoted a romantic style of writing. His love stories and experiments in free verse, particularly his poetry...

• Hafiz [Arab.,=one who has memorized the Qur'an], 1319-1389?, Persian lyric poet, b. Shiraz. His original name was Shams al-Din Muhammad. He acquired the surname from having memorized the Qur'an at an...

• Hariri (Abu Muhammad al-Kasim al-Hariri) , 1054-1122, Arab writer of Basra. His principal work is one of the most popular of Arabic books. It is called Makamat [literary assemblies], the name of a literary genre that was much affected at this time. It consists of 50 episodes, in which an old rogue, Abu Zaid, goes from place to place earning his living by...

• Hayashi Fumiko 1903-51, Japanese novelist and short-story writer. The daughter of an itinerant peddlar, Hayashi was raised in abject poverty. After finishing school, she moved to Tokyo to write, barely managing...

• Hikmet, Nâzum see Nâzum Hikmet.

• Ihara Saikaku 1642-93, Japanese writer. Saikaku began his literary career as a haikai [comic linked verse] poet, astonishing contemporaries with his skill at composing sequences of thousands of stanzas in a...

• Imru al-Kais see Amru al-Kais.

• Jami 1414-92, Persian poet, b. Jam, near Herat. His full name was Nur ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jami. His poetic influence was widespread. Nearly 100 works are attributed to him, of which some 40 are...

• Kakinomoto no Hitomaro ?-710?, early Japanese lyric poet. He is the greatest poet represented in the Manyôshu [collection of myriad leaves], which is the oldest extant Japanese poetry anthology. Court poet to three sovereigns, Hitomaro produced an extraordinary range of verse, from public elegies and...

• Kalidasa fl. 5th cent.?, Indian dramatist and poet. He is regarded as the greatest figure in classical Sanskrit literature. Except that he was retained by the Gupta court, no facts concerning his life are...

• Kawabata, Yasunari 1899-1972, Japanese novelist. His first major work was The Izu Dancer, (1925). He came to be a leader of the school of Japanese writers that propounded a lyrical and impressionistic style, in opposition to the proletarian literature of the 1920s. Kawabata's melancholy...

• Kemal, Yaşar 1922-, Turkish novelist, b. Kemal Sadik Gögçeli. His rural childhood was marked by poverty and trauma; at a mosque at age five he witnessed his father's murder and was blinded in one eye. Dropping...

• Khayyam, Omar see Omar Khayyam.

• Ki no Tsurayuki c.872-945, early Japanese diarist, literary theorist, and poet. Renowned for his erudition and skill in Chinese and Japanese poetry, Tsurayuki took the leading role in the compilation of the Kokinwakashû [collection of ancient and modern verse], the first imperial anthology of poetry. His much-cited preface to that work is the first formal articulation of a Japanese poetics and established a...

• Kuan Han-ch'ing c.1240-c.1320, Chinese playwright of the Yüan dynasty. He resided mainly in the capital Ta-tu (Beijing), where he acquired a reputation as a libertine. Of his 63 plays, 21 survive; six are incomplete or fragmentary. Most concern virtuous women...

• Kuo Mo-jo see Guo Moruo.

• Lao She pseud. of Shu She-yü or Shu Ch'ing-ch'un, , 1899-1966, Chinese writer. He wrote his first novels while teaching Chinese at the Univ. of London's School of Oriental Studies (1924-30). He continued to teach and write in China during the...

• Li Ang pseud. of Shih Shu-tuan , 1952-, Taiwanese writer. After graduating from college in Taiwan she studied drama in the United States in the 1970s. Her fiction, which includes the novella The Butcher's Wife (1983, tr. 1986) and a later edition of the novella together with short stories (tr. 1995), is critical of traditional Chinese culture and controversial for its portrayal of cultural superstition,...

• Li Ch'ing-chao 1084?-c.1151, Chinese poet. Li's 78 extant song lyrics [ tz'u ] have earned her a reputation as a master of lyrical poetry. She achieves a simple, natural voice while observing complex metrical demands. Her writing expresses melancholy concern over the passage...

• Li Pai see Li Po.

• Li Po Li Pai , or Li T'ai-po , c.700-762, Chinese poet of the T'ang dynasty. He was born in what is now Sichuan prov. Most authorities believe that he was a Taoist; Li Po's unconcern for worldly preferment and his love for...

• Li Shang-yin 813?-858, Chinese poet. Of his 598 extant works, the best known are untitled love poems that describe in rich, sensuous detail scenes of beautiful courtesans languishing in ornate boudoirs. Li...

• Lu Hsün see Lu Xun.

• Lu Xun or Lu Hsün , 1881-1936, Chinese writer, pen name of Chou Shu-jen. In 1902, he traveled to Japan on a government scholarship, eventually enrolling at Sendai Medical School. Troubled by what he saw as China's...

• Mao Dun see: Mao Tun.

• Mao Tun or Mao Dun , pseud. of She Yen-ping , 1896-1981, Chinese novelist and Minister of Culture (1949-65). His fiction offers a sympathetic portrayal of working-class life and praise of revolution....

• Masaoka Shiki 1867-1902, Japanese waka and haiku poet. Founder of the literary magazine Hototogisu and patron to a number of young poets, Shiki played a leading role in the revival of the traditional waka and haiku forms. He advocated a realistic, descriptive poetic style, which he regarded as...

• Matsuo Basho see Basho.

• Mechitar see Armenian literature.

• Mishima, Yukio 1925-70, Japanese author, b. Tokyo. His original name was Kimitake Hiraoka and he was born into a samurai family. Mishima wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He appeared on stage in...

• Mori Ogai 1862-1922, Japanese army physician, medical researcher, literary critic, novelist, translator, scholar, and playwright, he is now primarily remembered for his fiction. After an early flurry of...

• Murakami, Haruki 1949-, Japanese novelist, b. Kyoto, grad. Waseda Univ., Tokyo, 1975. He and his wife lived in Europe and the United States from 1986 to 1995. Widely considered one of Japan's most important...

• Murasaki Shikibu c.978-1031?, Japanese novelist, court figure at the height of the Heian period (795-1185). Known also as Lady Murasaki, she is celebrated as the author of the romantic novel Genji-Monogatari [tale of Genji], one of the first great works of fiction to be written in Japanese. It concerns the life of Prince Genji and his descendants and is a subtle and thorough delineation of a complex...

• Mutanabbi, al- 915-65, Arab poet, considered the greatest classical Arabic poet, b. Iraq. His early involvement with a religious cult earned him the sobriquet "the would-be prophet." He was part of the brilliant...

• Nâzum Hikmet (Nâzum Hikmet Ran) , 1902-63, widely recognized as Turkey's foremost modern poet, b. Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), grad. Moscow State Univ. A dedicated, lifelong communist, he was imprisoned on...

• Narayan, R. K. (Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan) , 1906-2001, Indian novelist, b. Madras (now Chennai). Narayan, who wrote in English, published his first novel, Swami and Friends, in 1935. He wrote hundreds of short stories for the Madras newspaper Hindu, but he first came to international attention when his works were hailed in England by Graham Greene. His humorous novel The Financial Expert (1952) was the first of his works published in the United States. Many of his 34 novels provide exquisitely crafted, witty, vital, and perceptive descriptions of everyday village life in India. His...

• Natsume Soseki 1867-1916, Japanese writer. Soseki ranks along with Mori Ogai as one of two giants of early modern Japanese letters. Although Soseki began his career as a scholar of English literature, he later...

• Oe, Kenzaburo 1935-, Japanese writer, b. Ose, on the island of Shikoku. At 18, he left his remote village and traveled to the capital, where he studied at Tokyo Univ. and began writing. In 1958 he won the...

• Omar Khayyam fl. 11th cent., Persian poet and mathematician, b. Nishapur. He was called Khayyam [tentmaker] probably because of his father's occupation. The details of his life are mostly conjectural, but he...

• Ono no Komachi fl. c.833-857, Japanese poet. She was celebrated for her beauty and erotically charged poetry. Ranked among the most prominent poets of her day, Ono no Komachi displayed a rare skill in weaving...

• Pa Chin see Ba Jin.

• Pamuk, Orhan 1952-, Turkish novelist, studied Robert College (now Univ. of the Bosporus) and Istanbul Univ. Pamuk uses many formal techniques derived from Western fiction to portray themes and settings from...

• Po Chü-i 772-846, Chinese poet. He occupied several important government posts, rising to the presidency of the imperial board of war in 841. He wrote over 3,000 poems, brief, topical verses expressed in...

• Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1925-2006, modern Indonesia's preeminent writer of fiction, b. Blora, Java. The son of a nationalist headmaster, he was a longtime journalist, involved left-wing politics from the 1940s until his...

• Rao, Raja 1909-2006, Indian novelist. Rao was educated in India and France and for many years divided his time among India, Europe, and the United States. From 1966 to 1980 he was professor of philosophy at...

• Rumi, Jalal ad-Din 1207-73, great Islamic Persian sage and poet mystic, b. in Balkh. His father, a scholar, was invited by the Seljuk sultan of Rum to settle in Iconium (now Konya), Turkey. His apprenticeship as a...

• Saadi see Sadi.

• Sadi or Saadi , Persian poet, 1184-1291. b. Shiraz. Orphaned at an early age, Sadi studied in Baghdad, where he met Suhrawardi, a major Sufi figure. Having to flee Baghdad because of the Mongol threat, he went on...

• Saigyo 1118-90, Japanese poet-priest of the late Heian, early medieval period. Born into a warrior clan, Saigyo studied with the most renowned poets of his day, producing relatively conventional poetry...

• Saikaku, Ihara see Ihara Saikaku.

• Sei Shonagon c.966?-?, Japanese poet and essayist of the mid-Heian period. She is best known for her Makura no sôshi [pillow book], a collection of anecdotes, reflections, aesthetic assessments, and anecdotes of court life, written from her experiences serving at the court of the empress Teishi. The more than...

• She Yen-ping see Mao Tun.

• Shih Shu-tuan see Li Ang.

• Shiki, Masaoka see Masaoka Shiki.

• Shimazaki Toson 1872-1943, Japanese poet and novelist. A pioneer in the establishment of a new Japanese verse form, Toson later turned his talents to prose fiction. Hakai [the broken commandment], a story of an outcast...

• Shu Ch'ing-ch'un see Lao She.

• Shu She-yü see Lao She.

• Shuji, Tsushima see Dazai, Osamu.

• Soseki, Natsume see Natsume Soseki.

• Su Shih see Su Tung-p'o.

• Su Tung-p'o 1036-1101, Chinese poet. He was also called Su Shih. Born in present-day Sichuan prov., he was one of a literary family. Su occupied many official posts, rising to president of the board of rites...

• Tagore, Sir Rabindranath 1861-1941, Indian author and guru, b. Calcutta (now Kolkata). Tagore came from a wealthy Bengali family. He went abroad in 1877 to study law in England but soon returned to India. For a time he...

• Takamura, Kotaro 1883-1956, Japanese poet and sculptor. After studying art in France, where he was profoundly influenced by Rodin, Takamura devoted his career to applying Western aesthetics to Japanese poetry and...

• Tanizaki, Junichiro 1886-1965, Japanese writer. A prolific writer whose popularity extended through the reigns of three emperors, Tanizaki is perhaps best known for Sasameyuki (1943-48, tr. The Makioka Sisters, 1957). A detailed account of an Osaka family that embraces a tradition-bound way of life, it was the first major Japanese work of the post-World War II period. Tanizaki's other novels include a...

• T'ao Ch'ien see T'ao Yüan-ming.

• T'ao Yüan-ming or T'ao Ch'ien, 365-427, Chinese poet. After several bitter experiences in government employment, he became a gentleman farmer. His poems, composed in simple diction at a time when ornateness was the fashion,...

• Teika, Fujiwara see Fujiwara Teika.

• Toer, Pramoedya Ananta see Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

• Toson, Shimazaki see Shimazaki Toson.

• Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in 1715-63, Chinese novelist. He is the author of Story of the Stone (or A Dream of Red Mansions ), which is considered China's greatest novel. After his wealthy and prominent family fell victim to an imperial purge in 1728, Ts'ao's father managed to avoid enslavement and resettled them in...

• Tsushima, Shuji see Dazai, Osamu.

• Tu Fu 712-70, Chinese poet. Tu Fu is often considered the greatest of Chinese poets. He did not pass the imperial civil service examinations and, although he held a few official positions for brief...

• Wang Wei 699-759, Chinese poet. He was an extremely versatile man, being a musician and painter as well as a poet. He wrote quatrains almost exclusively; these verses portray quiet scenes like those...

• Yosano, Akiko 1878-1942, Japanese poet, activist, and critic. Best known for passionately romantic verse, she infused the classic tanka poetic form with new life and a heady sensuality. Yosano and her husband Tekkan Yosano, also a poet, published the literary journal Myôjô, which introduced a number of poets of the contemporary Japanese romantic movement to the literary public. A prominent pacifist and feminist, Yosano spoke out against the Sino-Japanese war and the...

• Zeami Motokiyo or Kanze Motokiyo, c.1363-c.1443, Japanese actor, playwright, and drama theorist. Son of the itinerant actor Kanami, at the age of eleven Zeami attracted the attention of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who became...

• Zhang Xianliang 1936-, Chinese writer. During the 1957 antirightist campaign, the Chinese Communists judged his poetry deviant and sentenced him to prison in Ningxia. He was later transferred to a labor reform...

• Zhong Acheng see Ah Cheng.

• Zuhair fl. 6th cent., Arab poet. Zuhair is often considered the greatest writer of Arabic poetry in pre-Islamic times. His work is represented in the Muallaqat. Zuhair's poems deal with raids and other subjects...