D. M. Thomas

Donald Michael Thomas (25 January 1935 – 26 March 2023) was a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

Working primarily as a poet throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas's 1981 poetry collection Dreaming in Bronze received a Cholmondeley Award. He began writing novels, with The Flute-Player (his second novel, though the first to be published) appearing in 1979. Thomas's third novel The White Hotel won the 1981 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the 1981 Cheltenham Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the same year's Booker Prize, whose judges were prevented from naming it joint-winner alongside Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children due to prize rules.

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). He then published Flying in to Love (which concerns the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and five other novels. Bloodaxe Books published The Puberty Tree, the British edition of Thomas's "selected" poems, in 1992. 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. He also wrote a biography of Solzhenitsyn, which was awarded an Orwell Prize in 1999.

Early life and education

Thomas was born to plasterer Harold Thomas and his wife Amy on 25 January 1935, in Carnkie, Redruth, Cornwall. He was a descendant of miners and carpenters. His father spent time living in California during the 1920s and was fond of the United States.

Thomas attended Trewirgie Primary School between 1940 and 1945, then Redruth Grammar School from 1946 until 1949. In 1949, he and his family moved to the Australian city of Melbourne. Thomas spent the years between 1949 and 1951 at University High School there. In 1951, he returned to Carnkie and to Redruth Grammar School.

His National Service was from 1953 until 1955, most of which he spent learning Russian. He retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. 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. Thomas graduated with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford, having studied there between 1955 and 1958. Between 1959 and 1963 he was an English teacher at Teignmouth Grammar School. From 1963 he was an English lecturer at Hereford College of Education until he was made redundant upon its closure in 1978.

Writing

Thomas's first published work was a short story in The Isis Magazine in 1959. He published poetry and some prose in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (from 1968). Much of what he published until he was 40 years of age was poetry. Two Voices, his first book, was published in 1968; it consisted of poetry. Its title poem relates to science fiction/fantasy.

The title poem of Logan Stone (1971) refers to a balancing rock in Cornwall. Love and Other Deaths (1975) features elegiac poems relating to family. The Honeymoon Voyage (1978) was written around the time of his mother's death. His mother died in 1975.

The Flute-Player, the second novel Thomas wrote, was also published in 1978. 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. 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. 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". Dreaming in Bronze, Thomas's 1981 poetry collection, secured for him a Cholmondeley Award.

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. It was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize, coming a close second, according to one of the judges, to the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Thomas stated in an interview on BBC Radio Cornwall in 2015 that the Booker judges wanted to split the prize between himself and Rushdie, but that the Board informed them that the rules would not permit this, 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" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist. Graham Greene selected The White Hotel for his "Books of the Year". William Golding also selected The White Hotel as his Book of the Year for 1981. Thomas wrote the book during a sabbatical at New College, Oxford in 1978–79. He wrote some of it in Hereford, where he was living and used two typewriters, one in each city. It was translated into 30 languages.