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 Jim Thompson

Thompson, Jim
1906 - 1977

James Myers "Jim" Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. His father was of Scottish origin while his mother had Cherokee...

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Portrait image of Robert van Gulik

Gulik, Robert van
1910 - 1967

Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East...

Further reading
Portrait image of Guillaume Musso

Musso, Guillaume
1974 -

Frenchman who has written a number of thrillers which have been translated into many languages, and who is said to be the...

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Portrait image of Brian Freemantle

Freemantle, Brian
1936 -

Brian Harry Freemantle is a British writer and journalist. He was born in Southampton, Hampshire, where he attended...

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