Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images (2017)
Sample of authors
King, Stephen
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine. His father, Donald Pollock, a vacuum cleaner salesman, sailor and philanderer (King has a half-sister in Brazil), went through a number of aliases before he changed his surname to King. When Stephen was two years old, his father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. Stephen grew up in poor circumstances with his mother Ruth and his...
Literary figures
Mumtaz Hakim
Gender: Female
Her family come from Bangladesh, but she has grown up in London. She became a widow at a young age when her husband – a brutal petty gangster – was murdered in a gang fight, and since then she has lived alone with her teenage step-daughter Shazia. Even though Mumtaz Hakim is a Muslim, and thus wears a veil, she is employed as an assistant by private detective Lee Arnold. The two together are the p...