D. M. Thomas

Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas (born 27 January 1935), is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator.

Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, UK. He attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School^[1] before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall.

He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds (from 1968). The work that made him famous is his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981), the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981^[2] coming a close second^[3] to the winner, Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'.^[4] It has also elicited considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.^[5]

In the 1950s, at height of the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry in the 1980s.

Books

Fiction

• Logan Stone (Cape Goliard, 1971)
• Orpheus in Hell (Sceptre, 1977)
• The Flute Player (Gollancz, 1979)
• Birthstone (Gollancz, 1980)
• The White Hotel (Viking, 1981)
• Ararat (Gollancz, 1983)
• Swallow (Gollancz, 1984)
• Sphinx (Gollancz, 1986)
• Summit (Gollancz, 1987)
• Lying Together (Gollancz, 1990)
• Flying in to Love (Scribner's, 1992)
• Pictures at an Exhibition (Bloomsbury, 1993)
• Eating Pavlova (Carrol and Graf, 1994)
• Lady with a Laptop (Carrol and Graf, 1996)
• Memories and Hallucinations (Gollancz, 1998)
• Charlotte (Duck, 2000)

Poetry

• The Honeymoon Voyage (Secker and Warburg, 1978)
• Dreaming in Bronze (Secker and Warburg, 1981)
• The Puberty Tree (Bloodaxe Books, 1992)
• Flight and Smoke (Francis Boutle, 2010)

Translations

• Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A dove in Santiago : A novella in verse (Secker and Warburg, 1982)
• Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems (Penguin, 1983)
• Anna Akhmatova, You Will Hear Thunder (Ohio UP, 1985)

Nonfiction

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn : A Century in His Life (St. Martins, 1998)

References

1. ^ BBC website - Donald Michael Thomas
2. ^ http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/archive/15
3. ^ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4991293.ece
4. ^ http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/books/20
5. ^ Felder, L., D M Thomas - The Plagiarism Controversy in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1982

External links

• Thomas' Personal Website
• Thomas' biography at the Literary Encyclopedia
• Last Words: Thomas' account of William Golding's last evening Guardian - Saturday 10 June 2006 (Review Section)

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Name	Thomas, D. M.
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Date of birth	27 January 1935
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