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 of James McClure

McClure, James
1939 - 2006

The journalist and author James "Jim" McClure’s Scottish parents left for South Africa in 1930, and he was subsequently b...

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Portrait image of Peter O'Donnell

O'Donnell, Peter
1920 - 2010

Peter O’Donnell was a British author born in Lewisham, London, to an Irish family. His father was a well-known crime r...

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Portrait of Jo Spain

Spain, Jo
1979 -

The Irish author Joanne ‘Jo’ Spain was born into a working-class family in the little notorious residential district of Bel...

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Portrait of Bernhard Schlink

Schlink, Bernhard
1944 -

The German lawyer and author Bernhard Schlink was born in Grossdornberg (now part of the city of Bielefeld) and grew up in...

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