D. M. Thomas was an internationally published novelist, poet, and translator.
Born and raised in Cornwall, he studied Russian during his national service and has translated the work of Akhmatova, Pushkin and Yevtushenko.
His own poetry has won a Cholmondeley Award, but it is for his progressive and controversial novels that D. M. Thomas is best known. His unique and fantastical novel The White Hotel 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.
He is also the author of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century of his Life (1998), and Bleak Hotel, an account of the un-making of a film version of The White Hotel. He spent the majority of his life in Cornwall, and passed away there in March 2023.
