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 Ellery Queen

Queen, Ellery
Pseudonym

Ellery Queen is a pen name shared by Frederic Dannay, born Daniel Nathan, and Manfred B. (Bennington) Lee, born Manford...

Further reading
Portrait image of John Fowles

Fowles, John
1926 - 2005

John Robert Fowles was born in a middle-class family in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea. His father, Robert Fowles, dreamt...

Further reading
Portrait of Kate Atkinson

Atkinson, Kate
1951 -

The British author Kate Atkinson was born in York, her father was a shopkeeper. She read English literature at Dundee...

Further reading
Portrait of Volker Kutscher

Kutscher, Volker
1962 -

The German author Volker Kutscher was born in Lindlar and grew up in Wipperfürth near Köln (Cologne). He studied Germanic L...

Further reading