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 Rex Stout

Stout, Rex
1886 - 1975

The American author Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, as the sixth of nine children to John and Lucetta...

Further reading
Portrait of Bill Pronzini

Pronzini, Bill
1943 -

The extremely prolific American author William John "Bill" Pronzini is the prize-winning author of over a hundred works of...

Further reading
Portrait image of W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham, W. Somerset
1874 - 1965

William Somerset Maugham was a British author born in Paris. His father was a lawyer at the British Embassy there. When...

Further reading
Portrait of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel
1939 - 2003

Spanish author, journalist, essayist and poet. Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona the same year as General Franco came o...

Further reading