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 Peter May

May, Peter
1951 -

Writer of crime novels and TV manuscripts who has received many prizes. He was born in Glasgow in Scotland, but has lived...

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Portrait of Isaac Asimov

Asimov, Isaac
1920 - 1992

Isaac Asimov was born as Isaak Yudovich Ozimov in a small town near Smolensk in the former Soviet Union. When he was three...

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Portrait image of Algernon Blackwood

Blackwood, Algernon
1869 - 1951

The British author Algernon Henry Blackwood grew up in a strictly religious home in Kent. He soon abandoned his Christian...

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Portrait of Mo Hayder

Hayder, Mo
1962 - 2021

The British thriller writer Mo Hayder, pen name for Clare Dunkel, grew up in Essex. She revolted against her academic...

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