Poet, novelist, biographer and long-time friend of J&A Donald Michael Thomas has died, aged 88. Considered one of the greatest contributors to modern literature, Donald’s work has been translated into 30 languages worldwide and received numerous accolades throughout his lifetime.
Born in Cornwall in 1935, he spent some of his childhood in Australia, before returning to the UK to finish his schooling. He studied English at Oxford, graduating in 1958, and worked as a teacher and lecturer for a number of years.
Donald had learned Russian during his National Service in the 1950s, and maintained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. He would go on to publish a number of well-received translations of Russian poetry, including the works of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He also wrote a biography of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which was awarded the Orwell Prize in 1999.
The writer of dozens of poetry collections and fourteen novels, including the Russian Quartet, his best-known work, The White Hotel, was published in 1981 and is regarded as a ground-breaking examination of eroticism and sexuality. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and the Cheltenham Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, coming a close second to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. William Golding and Graham Greene were huge fans of the novel, naming it their ‘book of the year,’ and Rushdie himself considered The White Hotel to be a work of ‘blazing imagination and intellectual thought.’
Donald passed away in his beloved Cornwall, and is survived by his fourth wife, Angela Embree, and his three children. Leaving behind a wealth of thought-provoking writing created over a colourful lifetime, he will be sorely missed.
Photo credit: Ken Goff, The Guardian