The
UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day is held annually on 23 April to celebrate
reading, books, publishing, and copyright.
In
1923 booksellers in Spain had a festival on 23 April to commemorate the death
of author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). He was most noted for his
fictional novel, Don Quixote.
In
1995 UNESCO announced that the date would be an annual worldwide festival for
books, calling it the World Book and Copyright Day. UNESCO kept the date at 23 April
because it was also the birth and death anniversary of English poet and
dramatist William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
It
is also the birthdate of Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), famous
for the novel Lolita and Icelandic
author Halldor Laxness (1902-1998) who received the 1955 Nobel Prize in
Literature. Laxness translated Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms into Icelandic in 1941 and was a prolific author
in his own right. My favourites were The
Great Weaver from Kashmir, The Atom Station,
and The Fish Can Sing.
April
23 also marks the death of Peruvian writer Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616) in
the same year as Shakespeare and Saavedra. He wrote the history of the Incas.
English poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) also
died on this date. I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud was one of Wordsworth’s well-known poems, but he was best remembered
for The Prelude. Brooke was a war
poet noted especially for his sonnet The
Soldier. He died of an infected mosquito bite in a French hospital ship on
his way to the battle at Gallipoli during the First World War.
UNESCO
member states around the world – about 100 of them – celebrate the day by
promoting ways to disseminate and access the culture of the written word.
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