Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish-born writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. Beckett is best remembered for his 1953 play ''Waiting for Godot'', and he is considered to be one of the last modernist writers, as well as a key figure in what Martin Esslin called, the "Theatre of the Absurd".

A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. His later works became increasingly minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.

Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". In 1961 he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. Provided by Wikipedia