Bookish birthdays for the week of April 7, 2019

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of April 7, 2019.

William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770). Wordsworth wrote the majority of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, which helped launch the English Romantic movement.

Barbara Kingsolver (April 8, 1955). Among Kingsolver’s many acclaimed novels is The Lacuna, a mixture of history and fiction that won the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821). Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal in French) is among the most important poetry collections published in Europe in the nineteenth century.

Paul Theroux (April 10, 1941). Theroux is beloved for his travel books, such as The Great Railway Bazaar (his breakthrough work), and his novels, including The Happy Isles of Oceania.

Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906). Beckett, best known for his play Waiting for Godot, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 for “for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”

Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939). Though he’s perhaps better known for his poetry, Heaney’s translation of Beowulf became an international bestseller; he also won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Birthdays sourced from Calendar of Literary Facts; biographical information sourced from Encyclopedia Britannica and author websites. Did we miss someone? Email and let us know.