Yoko Ono (born February 18, 1933) – Japanese/U.S. artist – Grapefruit (1964)
Toni Morrison (Chloe Ardelia Wofford) (born February 18, 1931) - U.S. novelist, 1993 Literature Nobel Prize winner - Beloved
Read the excellent Authors Calendar biography of Toni Morrison here
Read an excerpt from Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye here
Meridian. The sound of it opens the windows of a room like the first four notes of a hymn. Few people can say the names of their home towns with such sly affection. Perhaps because they don't have home towns, just places where they were born. But these girls soak up the juices of their home towns, and it never leaves them. They are thin brown girls who have looked long at hollyhocks in the backyards of Meridian, Mobile, Aiken, and Baton Rouge. And like hollyhocks they are narrow, tall, and still. Their roots are deep, their stalks are firm, and only the top blossom nods in the wind. They have the eyes of people who can tell what time it is by the color of the sky.
Watch a biography of Toni Morrison
here
Leonard (Len) Deighton (born February 18, 1929) – U.K. novelist, illustrator – The Ipcress File (1962)
Read the Authors Calendar biography of Len Deighton here
Visit the Len Deighton fan website:
http://www.deightondossier.net/
Read an interview of Len Deighton here
He looks like a well-preserved retired don, but doesn’t sound like one, his cockney accent undiluted by four decades of living away from England.
His first four novels are a wonderful mixture of the exciting and the amusingly humdrum, narrated by an unnamed working-class intelligence officer from Burnley who spends as much time trying to reclaim his expenses as he does searching for kidnapped scientists. His Eton- and Oxbridge-educated superiors are usually incompetent – “what chance did I stand between the communists on the one side and the establishment on the other” – or treacherous.
Deighton doesn’t see the character as an anti-hero, and stresses that he is a romantic, incorruptible figure in the mould of Philip Marlowe. “This is not the way it is now. Modern fiction is not so keen to guard the integrity of our heroes … When I started writing I had rules. One was that violence must not solve the problem, and I cannot have the hero overcome violence with a counterweight of violence.”
Len Deighton talks about the Ipcress File
in this 1983 interview
here
Audre Lorde (born February 18, 1934) – U.S. poet, essayist, university professor, publisher
Read the Poets.org biography of Audre Lorde here
Read excerpts from Audre Lorde's book Sister Outsider
Nikos Kazantzakis (born February 18, 1883) Greek novelist – Zorba the Greek; The Last Temptation of Christ
Read the Google Books excerpts from Zorba the Greek here