D. M. Thomas
Donald Michael Thomas (25 January 1935 – 26 March 2023) was a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright.
Working primarily as a poet throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas's 1981 poetry collection Dreaming in Bronze received a Cholmondeley Award.
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).
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.
This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry from the 1980s onwards, particularly from Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Pushkin, as well as from Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
[1] Inspired by Russian poetry (especially Anna Akhmatova), it was his first novel to be published and does not contain much dialogue; he had earlier written Birthstone.
[12] Birthstone was published in 1980; it is the only one of Thomas's novels to feature his native Cornwall and to deploy instances of Cornish speech.
[13] There is also sex, suspenders and psychoanalysis; the London Review of Books described it as "Fantasy as Freud envisaged it, powerful enough to counter reality, working like free association and allowing the unconscious to take over".
[14] However, the work that made him famous was not poetry; it was his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981), the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States.
[15] It was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize,[16] coming a close second, according to one of the judges,[17] to the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
[24] Follow-up novel Ararat, published in 1983, was the first of a series concerning the Soviet Union, referred to as the Russian Nights Quintet;[25][26] it was inspired by Thomas's reading of Pushkin and a review of an Armenian poetry anthology which The Times Literary Supplement asked him to write.
[29] Summit was inspired by a meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Switzerland, while Lying Together predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the return of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Russia.
[35] His fourteenth novel (and his first in fourteen years), Hunters in the Snow appeared in 2014 and takes Vienna ahead of the First World War as its setting.
[1] As well as the Russians Pushkin and Akhmatova, Thomas listed his favourite poets as Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats, Charles Causley and Emily Dickinson.
