D. M. Thomas

Who is D. M. Thomas?

Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas, is a Cornish novelist, poet, playwright and translator.

Thomas was born in Redruth, Cornwall, UK. He attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall.

He published poetry and some prose in the British Science fiction magazine New Worlds. The work that made him famous is his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel, the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1981, coming a close second, in the view of some, to the winner, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It has also elicited considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.