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 John Fowles

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

Marsh, Ngaio
1895 - 1982

The New Zealand author Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh was born in Merivale, Christchurch. Her father was an immigrant English bank...

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Portrait image of Mark Billingham

Billingham, Mark
1961 -

The British author Mark Philip David Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, and grew up near Birmingham where he...

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Portrait of Ellis Peters

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...

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