Desk · Archieval Mariano
a limited weekly reading digest
19–25 OCTOBER 2026
SOME QUIET THIS WEEK
Not much on our calendar, but still a few things worth a dogear for you.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, on 16 October 1854. His mother, Jane Wilde, published poetry as Speranza. The house is now the Oscar Wilde Centre of Trinity College Dublin, home to its creative writing programme. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared in 1890.
READ ONLINE ›The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde · Free on Project Gutenberg
Gao Xingjian, the Chinese-born novelist and playwright who settled in France in 1987, became the first writer honoured for work in Chinese when the Swedish Academy named him the Nobel laureate on 12 October 2000. His novel Soul Mountain follows a long journey through rural China.
READ MORE ›Nobel Prize in Literature 2000: Gao Xingjian · NobelPrize.org
Italo Calvino was born on 15 October 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana, Cuba. Before he was two, his family returned to Italy and settled in Sanremo on the Ligurian coast. His books include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the stories of Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979).
READ MORE ›Italo Calvino · Britannica
On 16 October 1986 the Swedish Academy named the Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African writer to receive it. His plays, among them Death and the King’s Horseman (1975), draw on Yoruba myth and ritual as well as the European stage.
READ MORE ›The Nobel Prize in Literature 1986 · NobelPrize.org