D. M. Thomas


Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas, is a British novelist, poet, playwright and translator. He is best known for his novel The White Hotel.

Life

Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, UK. He attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Britain.
He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds. The work that made him famous is his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel, the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981, coming a close second, according to one of the judges, to the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The author himself stated in an interview on BBC Radio Cornwall in 2015 that the Booker judges wanted to split the prize between him and Salman Rushdie, but that the Board informed them that this wasn't in the rules,, although the rules were indeed changed in this respect the following year. It has also elicited considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.
In the 1950s, at height of the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry in the 1980s.

Books

Fiction