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  • 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 Mickey Spillane

Spillane, Mickey
1918 - 2006

The American author Frank Morrison Spillane was born in Brooklyn, New York, to an Irish Catholic father and Scottish...

Further reading
Portrait image of Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Davis, Dorothy Salisbury
1916 - 2014

The American crime writer Dorothy Salisbury Davis was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted by an older childless couple,...

Further reading
Portrait image of Geoffrey Household

Household, Geoffrey
1900 - 1988

Geoffrey Edward West Household grew up in Bristol where he attended Clifton College in 1914–19. He went on to study English a...

Further reading
Portrait of Gisa Klönne

Klönne, Gisa
1964 -

The German author Gisa Klönne was born in Stuttgart and grew up in Darmstadt. She wanted to become an author from an early ...

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