D. M. Thomas (1935) is an internationally published novelist,
poet, and translator. Born and raised in Cornwall, he studied Russian
during his national service and went on to read English at New College,
Oxford. He has lived and worked in Australia and the United States, and was
a teacher before he became a full-time writer. He is a prolific author, and
has published more than fifteen volumes of poetry, a similar number of
novels, and also has numerous translations of Russian poetry and a major
biography to his name. His work has international appeal, and has proved
especially popular in continental Europe and the US.
First and foremost a poet, D. M. Thomas has had poetry collections
published throughout his life, starting with Personal and Possessive
(1964), and including such well-known volumes as Two Voices (1968), Love
and Other Deaths (1975), The Honeymoon Voyage (1981), Dreaming in Bronze
(1981), winner of a Cholmondeley Award, Selected Poems (1983), and another
collection of new and selected poems, The Puberty Tree (1992). He has
collaborated with other pre-eminent poets on a number of collections, and
his most recent work is Dear Shadows (2004). It has been noted that his
poetry is greatly influenced by his love of Russian literature, and he has
translated the work of Akhmatova, Pushkin and Yevtushenko.
While his poetry has been widely acclaimed, it is for his progressive and
controversial novels that D. M. Thomas is probably best known. His unique
and fantastical novel, The White Hotel (1981), garnered massive critical
and popular attention, won the Los Angeles Times Fiction prize, the PEN and
Cheltenham prizes, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It has been
translated into over twenty languages worldwide, and plans for a film
adaptation have long circulated around Hollywood. His early novels include
The Flute-Player (1979), Birthstone (1980), and the five novels that make
up the `Russian nights' series: Ararat (1983), Swallow (1984), Sphinx
(1986), Summit (1987) and Lying Together (1990). Since then he has produced
Flying into Love (1992), Pictures at an Exhibition (1993), Eating Pavlova
(1994), and most recently, the novella Charlotte (2000). He has had a
selection of his memoirs published, called Memories and Hallucinations
(1988), and has also written Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century of his Life
(1998), scholarly and meticulously researched biography which was heralded
by a leading Solzhenitsyn scholar as "an extraordinary accomplishment... so
marvellously readable... in it I feel that Solzhenitsyn appears whole for
the first time".
D. M. Thomas currently lives in Truro, with his third wife, a dog and two
cats. He has a selection of grown-up children and step-children, and is
currently working on a new collection of poetry.