PEOPLE WHO WRITE

Southland Times, Issue 22758, 7 December 1935, Page 13

PEOPLE WHO WRITE

Miss Marguerite Steen, author of '“The Tavern,” was at one time an actress. She toured with Julia Neilson and Fred Terry. Although she was born in England, she says that she can think better in Paris than in any other city. She wrote the first part of an earlier novel, “The Wise and the Foolish Virgins,” in French. William Seabrook believes in carrying realism to extremes. His new book, “Asylum,” deals with his experiences when he spent seven months in a home to be cured of dipsomania. At the age of twenty-one he was city editor of an larger sale than any other first novel published in Scandinavia. In one year Since then he has wandered in many parts of the world. “Beyond Sing the Woods,” by Trygve Gulbransson, is said to have had a larger sale than any other first novel published in Scandinavia. In one year 13,000 copies were sold in Norway and 20,000 in Sweden. Mr Gulbransson was born in Oslo in 1894. At the age of nine he started work in a factory; now he owns one of the largest wholesale businesses in Norway. “Romilly Cavan” has published her third novel, “To-morrow is Also a Day,’ at the age of twenty-two. Before she was seventeen she had written a fulllength detective story, which, say her publishers, she declines to publish. She was born at Wallingford-on-Thames, but her father comes from Cavan, in Ireland—hence her pseudonym. Her mother writes under the name of Diana Patrick. A Memorial to Miss Gertrude Bell, the traveller and author who lived for many years among the Arabs, has been unveiled at Redcar. Her father was Sir Hugh Bell, the Teeside ironmaster. Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, one of Canada’s best known writers and poets, has published nearly fifty books. He has been schoolmaster and university professor, and during the war he rose to the rank of major. Laurence Meynell, whose latest novel Is called “Third Time Unlucky, lives at East Harting, Sussex, in what was originally the guest-house for the abbot of a near-by monastery. Among his neighbours are Gerald Bullett and Anthony Armstrong. I