D. M. Thomas

Donald Michael Thomas (25 January 1935 – 26 March 2023) was a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Working primarily as a poet throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas's 1981 poetry collection Dreaming in Bronze received a Cholmondeley Award. He began writing novels, with The Flute-Player (his second novel, though the first to be published) appearing in 1979. Thomas's third novel The White Hotel won the 1981 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 1981 Cheltenham Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the same year's Booker Prize, whose judges were prevented from naming it joint-winner alongside Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children due to prize rules.

Between 1983 and 1990, Thomas published his "Russian Nights Quintet" of novels, beginning with Ararat and concluding with Summit (inspired by a meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Switzerland) and Lying Together (which predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the return of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Russia). He then published Flying in to Love (which concerns the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and five other novels. Bloodaxe Books published The Puberty Tree, the British edition of Thomas's "selected" poems, in 1992. This followed the Penguin Books 1983 publication of Selected Poems, released for U.S. readers following his well-received novel The White Hotel.

A translator from Russian into English, Thomas worked particularly on Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Pushkin, as well as on Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He also wrote a biography of Solzhenitsyn, which was awarded an Orwell Prize in 1999.

Early life and education Thomas was born to plasterer Harold Thomas and his wife Amy on 25 January 1935, in Carnkie, Redruth, Cornwall. In 1949, he and his family moved to the Australian city of Melbourne. It was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize, coming a close second, according to one of the judges, to the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Thomas stated in an interview on BBC Radio Cornwall in 2015 that the Booker judges wanted to split the prize between himself and Rushdie, but that the Board informed them that the rules would not permit this, although the rules were indeed changed in this respect the following year. 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's use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist. Graham Greene selected The White Hotel for his "Books of the Year". It was translated into 30 languages.

Thomas's 2004 poetry collection Dear Shadows is inspired by photography and its title is a reference to Yeats.

Thomas wrote reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. He was one of the last people to see William Golding, the Nobel laureate, alive. Thomas visited Golding's house in Perranarworthal as a guest one evening in June 1993; he was the last person unrelated to Golding to leave, doing so around half an hour before Golding collapsed and died whilst preparing to go to bed. Thomas blamed himself for Golding's death and wondered if it would have happened if he had left earlier, with the other guests. 1981: Cheltenham Prize for Literature, for The White Hotel Two Voices (Cape Goliard, 1968) Logan Stone (Cape Goliard, 1971) The Shaft (Arc, 1973), a long poem Love and Other Deaths (Elek Books, 1975) The Honeymoon Voyage (Secker & Warburg, 1978) Orpheus in Hell (Sceptre, 1977) Protest (Hereford, 1980), after a poem by the medieval Armenian poet Frik; with an engraving by Reg Boulton Dreaming in Bronze (Secker & Warburg, 1981) Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1983), released in the United States following The White Hotel The Puberty Tree (Bloodaxe Books, 1992), the British "selected" edition of Thomas's poetry Dear Shadows (Fal Publications, 2004) Not Saying Everything (Bluechrome, 2006) Unknown Shores (Bluechrome, 2009) Flight and Smoke (Francis Boutle, 2010, with signed limited editions available from 2009) Two Countries (Francis Boutle, 2011) Vintage Ghosts (Francis Boutle, 2012), a verse novel, with six linocut illustrations by Tim Roberts Mrs English & other women (Francis Boutle, 2014) Corona Man: A Fictional Verse Journal in the Plague Year (The Cornovia Press, 2020) The Last Waltz: Poems (The Cornovia Press, 2021) A Child of Love and War: Verse Memoir (The Cornovia Press, 2021)

Novels

Thomas had 14 novels published between 1979 and 2014. The following books form a series known as the Russian Nights Quintet: Birthstone (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1980) The White Hotel (Viking Press, 1981) Ararat (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1983) Swallow (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1984) Sphinx (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1986) Summit (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1987) Lying Together (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1990) Flying in to Love (Scribner, 1992) Pictures at an Exhibition (Bloomsbury, 1993) Eating Pavlova (Carroll & Graf, 1994) Lady with a Laptop (Carroll & Graf, 1996) Charlotte (Duck, 2000) Hunters in the Snow (The Cornovia Press, 2014)

Memoirs

Memories and Hallucinations (Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1989) Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of the White Hotel (Quartet Books, 2008)

Biography Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (St Martins, 1998)

Play Hell Fire Corner (2004)

Texts edited The Granite Kingdom (Bradford Barton Ltd, Truro, 1970), an anthology of poems about Cornwall, edited by D. M. Thomas

Translations

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem and Poem without a Hero, (Elek Books, 1976) Anna Akhmatova, Way of All the Earth (Secker & Warburg, 1979) Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin (Viking Press, 1982) Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A Dove in Santiago: A novella in verse (Secker & Warburg, 1982) Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov (Sixth Chamber Press, 1985) Anna Akhmatova, You Will Hear Thunder (Oxford University Press, 1985) Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1988) Anna Akhmatova, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) Alexander Pushkin, Onegin (Francis Boutle, 2010) He married his first wife, Maureen Skewes, in 1958.