Desanka Maksimović was a Serbian poet, writer and translator. Her first works were published in the literary journal Misao in 1920, while she was studying at the University of Belgrade. Within a few years, her poems appeared in the Serbian Literary Herald, Belgrade's most influential literary publication. In 1925, Maksimović earned a French Government scholarship for a year's study at the University of Paris. Upon her return, she was appointed a professor at Belgrade's elite First High School for Girls, a position she would hold continuously until World War II.
Désiré François Laugée was a French painter. His work included portraits and classical religious or historical scenes.
His large murals still decorate several churches in Paris. He also made naturalist landscapes and genre paintings of peasants, particularly in his later life.
With this work he may be seen as a precursor of the Barbizon school. He achieved great success during his lifetime, although his work has since been largely ignored.
Desmond Bagley was an English journalist and novelist known mainly for a series of bestselling thrillers. He and fellow British writers such as Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean set conventions for the genre: a tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary hero pitted against villains determined to sow destruction and chaos for their own ends.
Desmond Dinan, an Irish academic, is the Jean Monnet Professor at the George Mason School of Public Policy, in Arlington, Virginia, US. He is the author of a number of textbooks on European integration and its history. He lives and works in the United States. He is married and has three children.
Desmond Egan is an Irish poet. He has published 24 Collections of poetry and published translations of Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Medea. His own work has been translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, Chinese, Spanish, Slovenian and Russian. He founded The Goldsmith Press (1972), edited the quarterly magazine for the arts Era (1974-1984), and starting in 1987 he has served as artistic director of the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival each July in Kildare, Ireland.
Desmond Hogan is an Irish writer. Awarded the 1977 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and 1980 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, his oeuvre comprises novels, plays, short stories and travel writing.