About the Author - Chosen Three

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

• His best known writing includes The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle.
• Explored the struggle of security and understanding in people.
• His mother lacked the intellect to be able to understand his dreams of being a writer.
• From an upper-middle class Jewish family.
• His friend Max Brod published a lot of Kafka's work after his death even though Kafka requested him to destroy it.
• Kafka's characters were normally up against some kind of enormous power which is believed to be related to the attitude his father had towards Kafka and the rest of the family.
• Socialist.
• Struggled with depression, anxiety and insomnia.
• His books were especially popular during WW2 and massively influenced German literature.

George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

• Best known writing includes Animal Farm, 1984 and Homage to Catalonia.
• Opinionated and strongly addressed some of the biggest political problems of his time, including fascism and communism. 
• His father was a British civil servant stationed in India meaning he rarely came home.
• When his father retired and Orwell got the opportunity to get to know him better he found him too conservative and they never formed a bond.
• Composed his first poem by the time he was four.
• "I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued."
• At school he noticed how the richer kids were treated better than the others.
• His birth name was Eric Blair which he changed to Orwell when he published his first book so he didn't embarrass his family.
• He became a writer for a socialist newspaper in 1943.
• "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Samuel Beckett 

• His best known writing includes Waiting For Godot, Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape.
• Novelist, playwright and a poet.
• He experienced severe depression in his teens which lead to be the influence of his writing.
• “I had little talent for happiness.”
• He travelled through Britain, France and Germany where he met people who would influence some of his most interesting characters.
• He settled in France and got stabbed by a pimp.
• In five years he wrote 10 books.
• His plays were not written with traditional lines with references to time and place but he focused on elements of the human condition using dark humour.
• The plays tend to focus on human despair as people live in a world with no help or understanding of what is going on.