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 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 Leslie Charteris

Charteris, Leslie
1907 - 1993

Leslie Charteris was born in colonial Singapore as Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin. His father, Suat Chuan Yin, was a wealthy...

Further reading
Portrait image of Antti Tuomainen

Tuomainen, Antti
1971 -

A Finnish author and journalist who gained international attention with his crime novels. They are translated into a number...

Further reading
Portrait of Georges Simenon

Simenon, Georges
1903 - 1989

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon was a Belgian author. He was born to Catholic middle-class parents in Liège. Georges ...

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