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.