#701
Little Richard
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Richard Wayne Penniman , known professionally as Little Richard, was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter. He was an influential figure in popular music and culture for seven decades. Described as the "Architect of Rock and Roll", Richard's most celebrated work dates from the mid-1950s, when his charismatic showmanship and dynamic music, characterized by frenetic piano playing, pounding back beat and powerful raspy vocals, laid the foundation for rock and roll. Richard's innovative emotive vocalizations and uptempo rhythmic music played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk.
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Franco Zeffirelli
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli was an Italian stage and film director, producer, production designer and politician. He was one of the most significant opera and theatre directors of the post–World War II era, gaining both acclaim and notoriety for his lavish stagings of classical works, as well as his film adaptations of the same. A member of the Forza Italia party, he served as the Senator for Catania between 1994 and 2001.
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Étienne Mougeotte
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Étienne Mougeotte was a French journalist and media director. During his fifty-year career, he served as Vice-President of TF1 Group and was satellite director of TF1 from 1987 to 2007 alongside Patrick Le Lay. He directed the editorial staff at Le Figaro from 2008 to 2012 and was Director-General of Radio Classique from 2012 to 2018. From 2015 to 2020, he was President of , including the magazine Valeurs actuelles.
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Philippe-Joseph Salazar
1955 - Present (69 years)
Philippe-Joseph Salazar , a French rhetorician and philosopher, was born on 10 February 1955 in Casablanca, then part of French Morocco. Salazar attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand a prestigious secondary-school in Paris before studying philosophy, politics and literature at the École Normale Supérieure. Since 1999 Salazar is a Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Salazar's lifelong achievements made him the recipient of Africa's premier research award in 2008, the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award. In 2015 he received a presti...
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Ádám Nádasdy
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ádám Nádasdy is a Hungarian linguist and poet. He is professor emeritus at the School of English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He specializes in post-generative phonological theory, morphophonology, English and Germanic historical linguistics, varieties and dialects of English, as well as English medieval studies and Yiddish philology.
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Jacques Rivette
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Jacques Rivette was a French film director and film critic most commonly associated with the French New Wave and the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. He made twenty-nine films, including L'Amour fou , Out 1 , Celine and Julie Go Boating , and La Belle Noiseuse . His work is noted for its improvisation, loose narratives, and lengthy running times.
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Christopher Wheeldon
1973 - Present (51 years)
Christopher Peter Wheeldon is an English international choreographer of contemporary ballet. Life and career Born in Yeovil, Somerset, to an engineer and a physical therapist, Wheeldon began training to be a ballet dancer at the age of 8. He attended the Royal Ballet School between the ages of 11 and 18. In 1991, Wheeldon joined the Royal Ballet, London; and in that same year, he won the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne competition.
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Michel Legrand
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Michel Jean Legrand was a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and jazz pianist. Legrand was a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores, in addition to many songs. His scores for two of the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort , earned Legrand his first Academy Award nominations. Legrand won his first Oscar for the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair , and additional Oscars for Summer of '42 and Barbra Streisand's Yentl .
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Judith Merril
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Judith Josephine Grossman , who took the pen-name Judith Merril around 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist, and one of the first women to be widely influential in those roles.
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Klaus Staeck
1938 - Present (86 years)
Klaus Staeck is a German lawyer and publisher who is best known in Germany for his political graphic design work. From 2006 to 2015 he was president of the Akademie der Künste at Berlin. Early life and education Klaus Staeck grew up in the East German city of Bitterfeld. After passing the Abitur in 1956 he moved to the West German city of Heidelberg where he lives down to the present day.
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Dan Flavin
1933 - 1996 (63 years)
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Early life and career Daniel Nicholas Flavin Jr. was born in Jamaica, New York, of Irish Catholic descent, and was sent to Catholic schools. He studied for the priesthood at the Immaculate Conception Preparatory Seminary in Brooklyn between 1947 and 1952 before leaving to join his twin brother, David John Flavin, and enlist in the United States Air Force.
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Mark Steedman
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Biography Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex in 1968, with a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology, and from the University of Edinburgh in 1973, with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence .
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Jacques Julliard
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jacques Julliard was a French historian, columnist and essayist, and a union leader. He was the author of numerous books. Life Early years Jacques Julliard was born on 4 March 1933 in Brénod, Ain. His father and grandfather had both been mayors of the village where he was born.
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William Kennedy
1928 - Present (96 years)
William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed. Kennedy's other works include The Ink Truck , Legs , Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , Roscoe and Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes . Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York.
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Fritz Leiber
1910 - 1992 (82 years)
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright, and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber is one of the fathers of sword and sorcery and coined the term.
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Ronen Bergman
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ronen Bergman is an Israeli investigative journalist and author. He is a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest-circulation daily. Bergman has written for The New York Times, where he is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek in the United States, and for The Times, The Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Europe. He is also interviewed frequently by the media in the United States and Europe, and his work is often quoted in Middle Eastern newspapers in...
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John Cale
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Davies Cale is a Welsh musician, composer, and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music.
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Wolfgang Butzkamm
1938 - Present (86 years)
Wolfgang Butzkamm is Professor Emeritus of English as a foreign language at Aachen University, Germany. He is credited with the development of a principled and systematic approach to the role of the mother tongue in foreign language teaching which radically differs from a target-language-only philosophy prevailing in many countries. For him, traditional monolingualism is an instance of a more general naturalistic fallacy which is committed when foreign language teaching is modelled after the natural acquisition of a first language , as in the direct method which was also called the natural m...
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Sidney Greenbaum
1929 - 1996 (67 years)
Sidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage, 1983–96. With Randolph Quirk and others, he wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language . He also wrote Oxford English Grammar .
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Elaine Feinstein
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Early life Born in Bootle, Lancashire, England, Feinstein grew up in Leicester. Her father had left school at 12 and had little time for books, but he was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never ...
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Andy Wallace
1947 - Present (77 years)
Andy Wallace is an American music studio producer and audio and mixing engineer with a long track record of productions. Over the years, he focused exclusively on mixing. Wallace is known for his "sonically influential presence on the current music scene", and has "helped to make some of the most brutal, aggressive music released and also some of the most beautiful".
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Gilbert Lazard
1920 - 2018 (98 years)
Gilbert Lazard was a French linguist and Iranologist. His works include the study of various Iranian languages, translations of classical Persian poetry, and research on linguistic typology, notably on morphosyntactic alignment. He also studied various Polynesian languages most notably the Tahitian language.
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John Durham Peters
1958 - Present (66 years)
John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. A media historian and social theorist, he has authored a number of noted scholarly works. His first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, traces out broad historical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, and technological contexts for the study of communication. His second book Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition updates the philosophy of free expression with a history of liberal thought since Paul of Tarsus. His signal wo...
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Eric Schlosser
1959 - Present (65 years)
Eric Matthew Schlosser is an American journalist and author known for his investigative journalism, such as in his books Fast Food Nation , Reefer Madness , and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety .
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Gerard Mortier
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Gerard Alfons August, Baron Mortier was a Belgian opera director and administrator of Flemish origin. Biography Born in Ghent, the son of a baker, Mortier attended in youth the Jesuit school Sint-Barbaracollege, following the death of his mother. He subsequently studied law and journalism at Ghent University.
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David Weber
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He has written several science-fiction and fantasy books series, the best known of which is the Honor Harrington science-fiction series. His first novel, which he worked on with Steve White, sold in 1989 to Baen Books. Baen remains Weber's major publisher.
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Gerald Gazdar
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gerald James Michael Gazdar, FBA is a British linguist and computer scientist. Education He was educated at Heath Mount School, Bradfield College, the University of East Anglia and the University of Reading .
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Ken Russell
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was a British film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. His films were mainly liberal adaptations of existing texts, or biographies, notably of composers of the Romantic era. Russell began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed many feature films independently and for studios.
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Jože Toporišič
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Jože Toporišič was a Slovene linguist. He was the author of the most influential Slovene scientific grammar of the second half of the 20th century, a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and coauthor of the Academy's Slovene Normative Guide . In this position, he transformed the linguistic section of the academy into the central regulatory authority for codification of Slovene.
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Frederick Newmeyer
1944 - Present (80 years)
Frederick J. Newmeyer is an American linguist who is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University Department of Linguistics. He has published widely in theoretical and English syntax and is best known for his work on the history of generative syntax and for his arguments that linguistic formalism and linguistic functionalism are not incompatible, but rather complementary. In the early 1990s he was one of the linguists who helped to renew interest in the evolutionary origin of language.
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Captain Beefheart
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Don Van Vliet was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble known as the Magic Band, he recorded 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, a loud, gravelly voice, and his claimed wide vocal range, though reports of it have varied from three octaves to seven and a half. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians.
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Christopher D. Manning
2000 - Present (24 years)
Christopher David Manning is an Australian computer scientist, best known for co-developing GloVe word vectors and the bilinear or multiplicative form of attention in artificial neural networks and for his books Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing and Introduction to Information Retrieval . He is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning and a professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He was previously President of the Association for Computational Linguistics and he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam .
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David Pringle
1950 - Present (74 years)
David Pringle is a Scottish science fiction editor and critic. Pringle served as the editor of Foundation, an academic journal, from 1980 to 1986, during which time he became one of the prime movers of the collective which founded Interzone in 1982. By 1988, he was the sole publisher and editor of Interzone, a position he retained until he sold the magazine to Andy Cox in 2004. For two-and-a-half years, from 1991 to 1993, he also edited and published a magazine entitled Million: The Magazine About Popular Fiction.
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Lewis H. Lapham
1935 - Present (89 years)
Lewis Henry Lapham is an American writer. He was the editor of the American monthly Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, a quarterly publication about history and literature, and has written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
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Sophie Long
1976 - Present (48 years)
Sophie Rebecca Long is an English journalist who works for BBC News, mainly appearing as a presenter on the BBC News Channel. On 18 March 2013, Long and co-presenter Simon McCoy read the final BBC News bulletin from BBC Television Centre.
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Vangelis
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou , known professionally as Vangelis , was a Greek keyboardist, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire , as well as for composing scores to the films Blade Runner , Missing , Antarctica , The Bounty , 1492: Conquest of Paradise , and Alexander , and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.
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Gerd Albrecht
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Gerd Albrecht was a German conductor. Biography Albrecht was born in Essen, the son of the musicologist Hans Albrecht . He studied music in Kiel and in Hamburg, where his teachers included Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg. He was a first-prize winner at the International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors at age 22. His first post was as a repetiteur at the Stuttgart State Opera. Later, he became Senior Kapellmeister at the Staatstheater Mainz, and Generalmusikdirektor in Lübeck. He also held posts at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and the Hamburg State Opera.
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W. Nelson Francis
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
W. Nelson Francis was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of Franklin & Marshall College and Brown University, where he specialized in English and corpus linguistics. He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.
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Una Canger
1938 - Present (86 years)
Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Co...
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Ken Loach
1936 - Present (88 years)
Kenneth Charles Loach is a British film director and screenwriter. His socially critical directing style and socialism are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty , homelessness , and labour rights .
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Robert Nicolaï
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Nicolaï is a French linguist specializing in the Songhay languages, professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. He is also founder and co-editor of the Journal of Language Contact. Selected publications Nicolaï, Robert . Les dialectes du songhay . Paris: SELAFNicolaï, Robert . Préliminaires à une étude sur l'origine du songhay . Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.Nicolaï, Robert . Parentés linguistiques . Paris: Editions du CNRS.Nicolaï, Robert; Zima, Petr . Songhay. Münich/Newcastle: Lincom Europa.Nicolaï, Robert. . La Traversée de l’empirique : essai d’épistémologie sur la construction des représentations de l’évolution des langues.
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Dizzy Gillespie
1917 - 1993 (76 years)
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, scat singing, bent horn, pouched cheeks, and light-hearted personality have made him an enduring icon.
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Samuel Brittan
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Sir Samuel Brittan was an English journalist and author. He was the first economics correspondent for the Financial Times, and later a long-time columnist. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
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Michael Isikoff
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Isikoff is an American investigative journalist who is currently the Chief Investigative Correspondent at Yahoo! News. He is the co-author with David Corn of the book titled Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, published on March 13, 2018.
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Reza Abedini
1967 - Present (57 years)
Reza Abedini is an Iranian graphic designer and a professor. His works keep a modern theme as he blends traditional Islamic patterns, calligraphy and culture. He combines simple illustrations with poetic typography and elegant layouts, exploring the beauty of the Persian language. He is also an art critic, independent art director with Reza Abedini Studio and the editor-in-chief of Manzar magazine in Iran.
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Peter Harvey
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Peter Michael St Clair Harvey was an Australian journalist and broadcaster. Harvey was a long-serving correspondent and contributor with the Nine Network from 1975 to 2013. Career Harvey studied his journalism cadetship with the Sydney newspaper The Daily Telegraph and won a Walkley Award in 1964. He worked at radio stations 2UE and 2GB before moving to London and working for BBC Radio. He then went on to The Guardian and the American Newsweek magazine as a reporter in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
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Mark Dery
1959 - Present (65 years)
Mark Dery is an American writer, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term "culture jamming" and is generally credited with having coined the term "Afrofuturism" in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.
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Mike Nichols
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Mike Nichols was an American director. He worked across a range of genres and had an aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their experience. He is one of 18 people to have won all four of the major American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony . His other honors included three BAFTA Awards, the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010. His films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins.
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Burton Raffel
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Burton Nathan Raffel was an American writer, translator, poet and professor. He is best known for his vigorous translation of Beowulf, still widely used in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Prose from the Old English, The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Essential Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Dante's The Divine Comedy.
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Mika Yamamoto
1967 - 2012 (45 years)
was an award-winning Japanese video and photojournalist for the news agency Japan Press. Yamamoto was killed on 20 August 2012 while covering the ongoing Syrian Civil War in Aleppo, Syria. She was the first Japanese and fourth foreign journalist killed in the Syrian Civil War that began in March 2011. She was the fifteenth journalist killed in Syria in 2012. Yamamoto was a recipient of the Vaughn-Uyeda Memorial Prize of the Japanese Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association for her reporting of international affairs in 2004.
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