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 Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith, Patricia
1921 - 1995

Patricia Highsmith was an American author born in Fort Worth, Texas, as Mary Patricia Plangman. Both parents were artists...

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Portrait image of Eliot Pattison

Pattison, Eliot
1951 -

The American author and lawyer, Joseph Eliot Pattison, was born in Philadelphia. He grew up on a farm run by his father;...

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Portrait of Simon Brett

Brett, Simon
1945 -

British author born in Worcester Park, Surrey. In 1949, the family moved to Ealing and a year later to Banstead where he...

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Portrait of Ferdinand von Schirach

Schirach, Ferdinand von
1964 -

Ferdinand von Schirach is a German lawyer and author born in Munich to a wealthy Protestant family. He grew up in Munich...

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