Wordsmith in a foreign tongue

Ya Sam takoitov at hotmail.com
Fri Sep 29 07:33:19 CDT 2006


The success of Jonathan Littell's 900 page holocaust novel written in French 
made me once again aware of that strange yet persistent phenomenon: authors 
choosing to write in a second or even a third language. So how many such 
authors (of note) are at loose?

For a start, the obvious ones and the ones I know:

Joseph Conrad (Polish, wrote in English)
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian, wrote in English)
Samuel Beckett (Irish, wrote in French)
Andrei Makine (Russian, writes in French)
Jerzy Kosinski (the most controversial one, Polish, wrote in English)
Tamas Aczel (Hungarian, wrote in English) (never read him, so don't know 
quality-wise)
I don't know whether Salman Rushdie counts, as nowhere did I read that Urdu 
was his first language.

Anyone else you know?
There is an opinion that writing in a second language promotes creativity.

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