Vocation : Writers : Autobiographer

Janet_Burroway

Janet Burroway (born September 21, 1936) is an American author. Burroway's published oeuvre includes eight novels, memoirs, short stories, poems, translations, plays, two children's books, and two how-to books about the craft of writing. Her novel The Buzzards was nominated for the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Raw Silk is her most acclaimed novel thus far. While Burroway's literary fame is due to her novels, the book that has won her the widest readership is Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, first published in 1982. Now in its 10th edition, the book is used as a textbook in writing programs throughout the United States.

Robert_Antelme

Robert Antelme (5 January 1917, Sartène, Corse-du-Sud – 26 October 1990) was a French writer. During the Second World War he was involved in the French Resistance and deported.
In 1939 he married Marguerite Duras. Their child died at birth in 1942. In the same year, Duras met Dionys Mascolo, who became her lover.

Antelme was arrested and deported on 1 July 1944. He was at Buchenwald, then Gandersheim. After the end of the war François Mitterrand found Antelme in a terrible state while visiting the Dachau concentration camp and organised his return to Paris; Mitterrand later reported that he had almost not heard Antelme's soft-voiced call to him. Marguerite Duras looked after Antelme and wrote La Douleur about his return. She divorced him soon after he regained his health, but they remained friends.

Bob_den_Uyl

Jacob (Bob) den Uyl (27 March 1930, Rotterdam – 13/14 February, 1992 Rotterdam) was a Dutch writer of mostly short stories.
His writing style is mostly ironic and observant. The most prominent theme in his work is the purposelessness and absurdity of existence. His earlier work consists mostly of absurd stories. In his later work, the focus of his writing shifted to more autobiographic stories, mostly concerned with travels (by bicycle) in neighbouring countries of The Netherlands.
Recurring elements in his work are:

His experiences as a child during World War II
World War I
His love for bicycle racing
His alcohol use
The city of RotterdamDuring his lifetime Den Uyl won the following prizes in literature:

In 1965, the “Prozaprijs” conferred by the city of Amsterdam for 'Vogels Kijken'
In 1968, the “Anna Blaman Prijs” for 'Een zachte fluittoon'
In 1976, the “Multatuli-prijs” for 'Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam'In 2004, the editorial board of the VPRO-Gids established the Bob den Uyl prize for travel stories. Several collected stories have been posthumously published. In 2008, Nico Keuning published Bob den Uyl's biography.

Misha_Defonseca

Misha Defonseca (born Monique de Wael) is a Belgian-born impostor and the author of a fraudulent Holocaust memoir titled Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, first published in 1997 and at that time professed to be a true memoir. It became an instant success in Europe and was translated into 18 languages. The French version of the book was a derivative work based on the original with the title Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with Wolves) that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film of the same name in 2007.On 29 February 2008, the author as well as her lawyers admitted that the bestselling book was fraudulent, despite its having been presented as autobiographical.
In 2014 a US court ordered Defonseca to repay her US publisher Mt. Ivy Press $22 million that she had been awarded in an earlier legal suit against the publisher.

Joachim_Ringelnatz

Joachim Ringelnatz is the pen name of the German author and painter Hans Bötticher
(7 August 1883, Wurzen, Saxony – 17 November 1934, Berlin). His pen name Ringelnatz is usually explained as a dialect expression for an animal, possibly a variant of Ringelnatter, German for grass snake or more probably the seahorse for winding ("ringeln") its tail around objects. The seahorse is called Ringelnass (nass = wet) by mariners, an occupation to which he felt kinship. He was a sailor in his youth and spent the First World War in the Navy on a minesweeper.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a Kabarettist, i.e., a kind of satirical stand-up comedian.
He is best known for his wry poems using word play and sometimes bordering on nonsense poetry. Some of them are similar to Christian Morgenstern's, but more satirical in tone and occasionally subversive. His most popular character is the anarchic sailor Kuddel Daddeldu with his drunken antics and disdain for authority.
In his final thirteen years Ringelnatz was also a dedicated and prolific visual artist. The bulk of his art went missing during World War II, but over 200 paintings and drawings survived. In the 1920s some of his work was exhibited at the Akademie der Künste along with that of his contemporaries Otto Dix and George Grosz. Ringelnatz illustrated his own novel called "...liner Roma..." (1923), the title of which is a doubly truncated "Berliner Roman" (Berlin novel), for "Berlin novels usually have no decent beginning and no proper ending." ("Berliner Romane haben meist keinen ordentlichen Anfang und kein rechtes Ende.")
In 1933, he was banned by the Nazi government as a "degenerate artist".
Ringelnatz's widow Leonharda Pieper married Julius Gescher after Ringelnatz's death, and their son Norbert managed Ringelnatz's legacy and assembled a collection. Norbert donated the collection to the Joachim Ringelnatz Museum in Cuxhaven in 2019.