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 James McClure

McClure, James
1939 - 2006

The journalist and author James "Jim" McClure’s Scottish parents left for South Africa in 1930, and he was subsequently b...

Further reading
Portrait of Dean R. Koontz

Koontz, Dean R.
1945 -

Dean Ray Koontz is an American author of suspense literature. He was born in Everett, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a...

Further reading
Portrait of Megan Abbott

Abbott, Megan
1971 -

The American scholar and author Megan Abbott was born in Detroit and raised there and at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She...

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Portrait of J.K. Rowling

Rowling, J.K.
1965 -

The British writer, J.K. Rowling, was born as Joanne Rowling in Yate in Gloucestershire, England. As an adult, she added...

Further reading