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 Donald E. Westlake

Westlake, Donald E.
1933 - 2008

Donald Edwin Westlake was an American author of Irish descent born in Brooklyn, New York. As a small boy, he moved with his...

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Portrait image of Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner, Erle Stanley
1889 - 1970

Erle Stanley Gardner was an American author and lawyer born in Malden, Massachusetts. His father was a mining engineer who...

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Portrait image of Liza Cody

Cody, Liza
1944 -

Pseudonym for Liza Nassim, English crime fiction writer, born in London where she grew up. She had problems in school – it l...

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Portrait image of Mika Waltari

Waltari, Mika
1908 - 1979

The Finnish author Mika Waltari is considered one of the foremost Nordic authors of the 20th century. Many of his books are...

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