D. M. Thomas is an internationally published novelist, poet, and translator. Born and raised in Cornwall, he studied Russian during his national service and went on to read English at New College, Oxford. He has lived and worked in Australia and the United States, and was a teacher before he became a full-time writer. He is a prolific author, and has published more than fifteen volumes of poetry, a similar number of novels, and also has numerous translations of Russian poetry and a major biography to his name. His work has international appeal, and has proved especially popular in continental Europe and the USA.

First and foremost a poet, D. M. Thomas has had poetry collections published throughout his life, starting with Personal and Possessive (1964), and including such well-known volumes as Love and Other Deaths (1975), the Cholmondeley Award-winning Dreaming in Bronze (1981), Selected Poems (1983), and another collection of new and selected poems, The Puberty Tree (1992). He has collaborated with other pre-eminent poets on a number of collections, and his most recent work of poetry is Dear Shadows (2004). It has been noted that his poetry is greatly influenced by his love of Russian literature, and he has translated the work of Akhmatova, Pushkin and Yevtushenko.

While his poetry has been widely acclaimed, it is for his progressive and controversial novels that D. M. Thomas is probably best known. His unique and fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981) garnered massive critical and popular attention, won the Los Angeles Times Fiction prize, the PEN and Cheltenham prizes, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide, and plans for a film adaptation have long circulated around Hollywood. His early novels include The Flute-Player (1979), Birthstone (1980), and the five novels that make up the ‘Russian nights’ series (1983-1990). Since then he has produced Flying into Love (1992), Pictures at an Exhibition (1993), Eating Pavlova (1994), and more recently, the novella Charlotte (2000). He has had a selection of his memoirs published, called Memories and Hallucinations (1988), and has also written Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century of his Life (1998), the definitive biography of the recently deceased Russian author.

Following on from an article published in the Guardian newspaper, he has recently completed an account of The White Hotel's abortive journey to the cinema screen, to be published as Bleak Hotel by Quartet. An entertaining and shocking story, it lifts the lid on the greed and duplicity of Hollywood, and the way authors and their works can be used and abused.

D. M. Thomas currently lives in Truro with his wife, a dog and two cats, and is currently working on a new collection of poetry.

Recent books:

Bleak Hotel (Quartet: 2008)

Dear Shadows (Fal: 2004)

Charlotte (Duck: 2000)