Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships. He was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount in Quebec, into a middle-class Jewish family.. His father, Nathan Cohen died when Cohen was nine years old. Cohen attended Westmount High School, where he studied music and poetry As a teenager, he learned to play the guitar, and formed a country-folk group called the Buckskin Boys. In 1951, Cohen enrolled at McGill University, where he became president of the McGill Debating Union. Poetry Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) was published as the first book in the McGill Poetry Series the year after Cohen's graduation. The book contained "poems written largely when Cohen was between the ages of fifteen and twenty," and Cohen dedicated the book to his late father. After completing his undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in McGill's law school and then a year (1956-7) at the School of General Studies at Columbia University. Consequently, Cohen left New York and returned to Montreal in 1957, working various odd jobs and focusing on the writing of fiction and poetry, including the poems for his next book, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961. Fortunately for Cohen, his father's will provided him with a modest trust income. This book helped Cohen gain critical recognition as an important new voice in Canadian poetryCohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout much of the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on Hydra, in Greek . He lived there with Marianne C. Stang Jensen Ihlen (born in Norway 1935), and the song "So long Marianne" was written to and about her. Their relationship lasted for most of the 1960s. While living and writing on Hydra, Cohen published the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). His novel The Favourite