Biographies

Lou Kassem is the author of a dozen juvenile novels representing a variety of genres, among them humor, mystery, history, and the supernatural. In books such as Middle School Blues, Listen for Rachel, Secret Wishes, and A Haunting in Willi...

Katarina Frostenson rose to fame in 1992 when she was elected into the Swedish Academy. Lauded as the youngest, and most beautiful, member of the academy, she had also gained the respect and recognition few women writers have. Since her de...

Sen Katayama (1860-1933) was a Japanese labor and Socialist leader who, influenced by the Christian social gospel and increasingly radical ideas, founded Japan's first modern settlement house, trade union movement, labor newspaper, and Soc...

Kate Atkinson gained sudden prominence as an important contemporary British novelist when her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1995, overcoming formidable competition tha...

"My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog." Thus begins Kate DiCamillo's 2001 Newbery Honor no...

The English illustrator Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) dramatically changed the art of the picture book. For many modern critics, her work represents the essence of a Victorian childhood. For over a hundred years, Kate Greenaway's works have b...

In the 1930s Kate O'Brien was widely recognized as the only outstanding Irishwoman writing after the Irish Renaissance. Leaving the country's political tension and social upheaval to the likes of Sean O'Casey, she found that life's real dr...

Born in Hungary in the late nineteenth century, Kate Seredy, author and illustrator, is best remembered for the books she wrote about her homeland, especially the 1938 Newbery Medal-winner, The White Stag. The only child of Louis Peter Ser...

In the history of Russian culture it would be difficult to find a figure more enigmatic than Pavel Katenin. A member of a secret revolutionary society, the Soiuz Spaseniia (Union of Salvation), he remained a "Decembrist without December," ...

Dedicating her life and her fortune to philanthropy, Katherine Drexel (1858-1955) founded a Catholic order of sisters, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to work for Native Americans and African Americans. Katherine Drexel was born in P...

Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) was a critically successful actress on the stage and on the screen for over 50 years, delighting audiences with her energy, her grace, and her determination. Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut...

Katharine Tynan's importance to English literature is difficult to assess. Her tastes were as varied as her writing was prolific. During her career of more than fifty years, she wrote as many as seven books in one year, and, not surprising...

Katherine Burr Blodgett is credited with the invention of the color gauge and non-reflecting or "invisible" glass. Born in Schenectady, New York, in 1898, Blodgett had an unusual early education. Her mother, widowed just months before Kath...

The tyrannical young King Imre, hated by many in the medieval kingdom of Gwynedd for his injustices against the people, has just murdered courtier Cathan MacRorie, who has been like a brother to him and truly had no knowledge of a treasono...

Short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is noted for her short stories with themes relating to women's lives and social hierarchies as well as her sense of wit and characterizations. Katherine Mansfield has played an important r...

Best known today for her poems on female friendship, Katherine Philips wrote some 125 poems on a variety of subjects; she translated plays by Pierre Corneille and five shorter Italian and French pieces; and she wrote a series of letters to...

Much of Kathleen Hale's early life is in distinct contrast to the books for which she is known. Her father, Charles Edward Hale, died when she was only five. When her mother, Ethel Alice Aylmer Hale, was unable to care for them, the three ...

Over more than forty years Kathleen Raine has written twelve volumes of poetry, three volumes of autobiography, several volumes of essays and criticism, numerous translations, and introductions to the work of other poets. The recipient of ...

Throughout all her work, Janet Kauffman's professed and persistent interest is in language--its material presence and creative power. Situating her work in conventional genres or forms is secondary to her interest in the physicality of wor...

"I was born in Berlin, where my father was studying medicine. Russia, however, is the country of my childhood and Russian is my native language."1 "I remember ... the Russian Revolution in Odessa, where we lived: winter famine, chaos on th...

If one were to choose a term to describe P. J. Kavanagh, it might be "doubting optimist." The persona that emerges from Kavanagh's poetry has experienced suffering and loss, but he neither understands nor feels capable of understanding eit...

Five-year-old Michigan resident, Kayla Rolland, was killed by a first-grade classmate in February of 2000 in an incident that made international headlines. Rolland, born in 1994, was the third child of a factory worker, Veronica McQueen. T...

Casimir Pulaski (1747-1779), Polish patriot and American Revolutionary War hero, fought unsuccessfully against foreign control of his native Poland and then journeyed to America to fight in the American Revolution. Born in Podolia, Casimir...

"When I write a novel perhaps some part of me wants to offer in a book an experience that you can't get easily sitting in front of a cinema screen or a television screen," novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told Linda Richards in an interview for Jan...

Charlotte Keatley's primary contribution to contemporary theater is her highly acclaimed play My Mother Said I Never Should. She received the Manchester Evening News Best New Play award after the play's initial run in Manchester in 1987, a...