D. M. Thomas

Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas (born 27 January 1935, Redruth, Cornwall, UK) is a Cornish novelist, plagiariser, poet, and translator. He attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School 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.

A prolific writer, Thomas' career has been most successful when his circumstances have allowed him to concentrate on writing. A position at the American University, for example, proved disastrous and was cut short after only a week.

Among his best-known works is his somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981), the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis. Like much of his work, it is not particularly popular in the UK, but has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States. 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' use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.

In the 1950s, with the West's focus on the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He never made any military use of it, but 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)

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)

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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