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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...
Sample of Authors
![Portrait image of John Fowles](images/writer/559/6197cfd239190ba6b62c59b2872aad157640d9f35b682.jpg)
Fowles, John
1926 - 2005
John Robert Fowles was born in a middle-class family in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea. His father, Robert Fowles, dreamt...
Further reading![Portrait of Ngaio Marsh](images/writer/1134/609a9465d5f9aded0085dc2e0c883e1a24b969c84b4bd.jpg)
Marsh, Ngaio
1895 - 1982
The New Zealand author Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh was born in Merivale, Christchurch. Her father was an immigrant English bank...
Further reading![Portrait image of Mark Billingham](images/writer/3180/3180.jpg)
Billingham, Mark
1961 -
The British author Mark Philip David Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, and grew up near Birmingham where he...
Further reading![Portrait of Ellis Peters](images/writer/1362/60941c6d196e734ac85334d47d8654aa1a5ed6ca00f74.jpg)
Peters, Ellis
1913 - 1995
Because readers know the British author Edith Mary Pargeter both by her own and her pen name Ellis Peters, some of her...
Further reading