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 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...

Further reading
Portrait of Jeffrey Archer

Archer, Jeffrey
1940 -

Jeffrey Howard Archer is a British author, former politician and peer of the realm surrounded by scandal. His thrillers and...

Further reading
Portrait of Robert B. Parker

Parker, Robert B.
1932 - 2010

Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father was head of a telephone company. Parker...

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