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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 Dashiell Hammett](images/writer/692/61926aacc63afbffa299fd7d71e60212c31220aa8782f.jpg)
Hammett, Dashiell
1894 - 1961
American detective writer, born in St. Mary's County in Maryland. He grew up in Baltimore where his family moved when he...
Further reading![Portrait image of Robert van Gulik](images/writer/662/618d33b1978b69da6979a6c6c6fc5447d64a72c32d35e.jpg)
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 Thomas Keneally](images/writer/919/61670c460617e769e29649c87ff89273f414711958b2b.jpg)
Keneally, Thomas
1935 -
The novelist and non-fiction writer Thomas ‘Tom’ Keneally descends from a family of Irish prisoners that were deported to Aus...
Further reading![Portrait image of John Connolly](images/writer/3955/6299004fdc1661237517940bd86e1530ce9127897abcc.jpg)
Connolly, John
1968 -
Irish author, born and raised in Dublin. After finishing school, he worked for a few years, including jobs as a bartender...
Further reading