Meny
  • It is 86 years today since Joyce Carol Oates was born.

    American author, born into a Protestant working-class family in the little town of Lockport in the western part of the state of New York. The family had a difficult economic situation and she spent most of her childhood and adolescence with her paternal grandparents on a farm in Erie. As a child, she liked to read and write; she got her first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, from her g...

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  • It is 67 years today since Alexandra Marinina was born.

    Alexandra Marinina is the pseudonym of Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva, a Russian author born in Lviv, western Ukraine. Her father, who died in 1973, was a police officer and her mother a lawyer. When she was still young, the family moved to Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) and then to Moscow. She attended an English-language school in Leningrad, and the Rimsky-Korsakov conservatory in Moscow. She...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait image of Alexander McCall Smith

McCall Smith, Alexander
1948 -

The British author Alexander McCall Smith – called Sandy by family and friends – was born in Bulawayo in the then British col...

Further reading
Portrait image of Dennis Lehane

Lehane, Dennis
1966 -

The American crime writer Dennis Lehane grew up in an Irish family as the youngest of five children in Dorchester on the...

Further reading
Portrait image of Thomas Keneally

Keneally, Thomas
1935 -

The novelist and non-fiction writer Thomas ‘Tom’ Keneally descends from a family of Irish prisoners that were deported to Aus...

Further reading
Portrait of Domingo Villar

Villar, Domingo
1971 -

Domingo Villar is a Spanish novelist born in Vigo, Galicia. He now lives in Madrid where hosts a radio show about food....

Further reading