【推荐1】David Unaipon was an inventor and writer. He was the first Aboriginal (土著的) Australian to write published books. He also worked hard to make life better for Aboriginal people.

David Unaipon was born in South Australia, in 1872. As a young man, he loved to read and was interested in science and music. He thought a lot about new ways to fix engineering problems. Between the years 1909 and 1944, Unaipon made nine important inventions. He also made drawings for a helicopter design. He got the idea from the Australian boomerang (回飞镖) and the way it moved through the air. This happened in 1914, before we had helicopters.

Unaipon lived most of his life in Adelaide and worked for the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association. He worked and travelled around southeastern Australia for fifty years. Sometimes, while travelling from town to town, he was told he couldn’t stay in a hotel because he was black, so he understood the problems of racism (种族主义).

In 1925, Unaipon became the first Aboriginal writer to be published. His first published writing was an article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper. The article had the title:“Aboriginals: Their Traditions and Customs”. He wrote many other articles for newspapers and magazines, getting publicity about the rights of Aboriginal people. He also wrote about the need for white and black people to work together and the need for equal rights for both black and white Australians. He was well educated in both cultures, and in 1929 he helped with a government survey of Aboriginal health and interests.

David Unaipon died in 1967 at the age of 95, in the same year that Aboriginal people were first counted as part of Australia’s population. In 1995, David Unaipon’s picture was put on the Australian fifty-dollar note, with a drawing of one of his inventions.

【推荐1】Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German writer, has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. The award was announced in Stockholm on Thursday.

Ms. Müller, 56, immigrated to Germany from Romania in 1987. She is the first German writer to win the Nobel in literature since Günter Grass in 1999 and the 13th winner writing in German since the prize was first given in 1901. She is the 12th woman to win the literature prize. But unlike previous winners like Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul, Ms. Müller is relatively unknown outside of literary circles in Germany.

“I am very surprised and still cannot believe it,” Ms. Muller said in a statement delivered by her publisher in Germany. “I can’t say anything more at the moment.”

She has written some 20 books, but just 5 have been translated into English, including the novels “The Land of Green Plums” and “The Appointment.”

At the news conference on Thursday at the German Publishers & Booksellers Association in Berlin, where she lives, Ms. Müller, wearing all black and sitting on a leopard-print chair, appeared nervous with all the cameras flashing on her.

When asked what it meant that her name would now be mentioned in the same breath as German greats like Thomas Mann and Heinrich Böll, Ms. Müller remained philosophical. “I am now nothing better and I’m nothing worse,” she said, adding, “My inner thing is writing. That’s what I can hold on to.”

Earlier in the day, at a news conference in Stockholm, Peter Englund, secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Ms. Müller was honored for her “very, very distinct special language” and because “she has really a story to tell about cruelty and repression in a village much like the one Müller grew up in.”

The awards ceremony was planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Ms. Müller would receive about $1.4 million.

【推荐3】WHEN JANE AUSTEN’S first novel Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, the title page simply read. ‘A Novel. In Three Volumes. By a Lady’. What could be greater justice than the fact that on her 200th death anniversary, that same anonymous lady gets her very own bank note? Austen is only the third writer to grace an English note (following William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens) and the first woman writer to do so. And really, no one can be unhappy with the honour.

When Austen died at 41, on June 18th, 1817, her profession as a writer did not make it to her epitaph. Her brother Henry chose instead to focus on her ‘charity, devotion, faith and purity’. While she never got to embrace the title of an author when she was alive, death has ensured her legacy. Her books have been translated into 40 languages and Pride and Prejudice itself has sold over 20 million copies. If her epitaph were to be written today, we could, perhaps, borrow from Virginia Woolf who wrote in The TLS of 1913, “More than any other novelist she fills every inch of her canvas with observation, fills every sentence with meaning, stuffs up every chink of the fabric until each novel is a little living world, from which you cannot break off a scene or even a sentence without bleeding it of some of its life. Her characters are so lively and vivid that they have the power to move out of the scenes in which she placed them into other moods and circumstances.”

The greatness of Austen is not only that she created the standard example of the modern novel, but that she continues to be relevant. Her novels have been endlessly adapted and modified because they still make sense today, because they can explain current sensibilities. Her characters can easily move out of London or Pemberley or Mansfield Park and be placed in Delhi or Shanghai or Beijing. Indianise the names, and we can all create our own comedy of manners. Mrs Bennet, the mimsy busybody, could easily be Mrs Batra, your Punjabi neighbour with an axe to grind and daughters to wed. Emma Woodhouse, the self-absorbed, privileged young lady could be Aisha of south Bombay, whose artifice overwhelms her potential. Mr Darcy could be your Mr Dasgupta, the dignified Bengali bachelor whose silence will be misunderstood as snobbery.

A fascinating study of Austen’s novels in facts, figures and charts published in The Guardian brings to light the world she knew and the only world she wrote about. All her characters(in her six novels) are independently wealthy who have no professions. Balls and picnics feature in all of her books. Evenings and afternoons are spent playing cards. And if romance is the base of her novels, then elopement is also a must. The servants speak no lines. The only historic event of the time that gets a mention is the Napoleonic War(1803-1815). The Industrial Revolution and French Revolution are not mentioned at all. The lovers will marry by the end.

Even if the plots of her six novels are simple enough, the success of Austen is her singular wit. It is a cleverness born from immediate observation but one which is universal in nature. She says it well in Northanger Abbey. ‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be extremely stupid.’

Two hundred years after her death, you have to be a fool to not enjoy her novels.