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 Simon Brett

Brett, Simon
1945 -

British author born in Worcester Park, Surrey. In 1949, the family moved to Ealing and a year later to Banstead where he...

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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 of Patricia Moyes

Moyes, Patricia
1923 - 2000

Patricia Moyes was born Patricia Pakenham-Walsh in Dublin, Ireland. She was educated at Overstone School in Northampton...

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Portrait image of Gavin Lyall

Lyall, Gavin
1932 - 2003

Gavin Tudor Lyall was a British author of espionage thrillers. He was born in Birmingham, England, where he attended the...

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