D.M. Thomas

1935–2023

Cornish poet, novelist and translator. Born in Carnkie, near Redruth, he spent two teenage years in Melbourne, learned Russian during National Service and read English at New College, Oxford. He published poetry through the 1960s and 1970s and later translated Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Pushkin. His Russian Nights sequence of five novels appeared between 1983 and 1990, and his biography of Solzhenitsyn won an Orwell Prize. He died in March 2023. The White Hotel, his third novel, about a woman in psychoanalysis whose life ends at Babi Yar, was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize.

Timeline of D.M. Thomas’s life

Works

• The White Hotel (1981)

Prizes

• The White Hotel — The Booker Prize 1981: Shortlist