Writer, critic and broadcaster, Frederic Raphael was educated at Charterhouse School and at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written several screenplays and fifteen novels. His The Glittering Priz…
John Grisham is the author of more than fifty consecutive #1 bestsellers, which have been translated into nearly fifty languages. His recent books include Framed, Camino Ghosts and The Exchange: After…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Michael David Herr was an American writer and war correspondent, known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The b…
Stanley Kubrick was an influential American filmmaker, screenwriter and producer. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care …
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan…
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed internatio…
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. He received acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities. In a career …
Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Manhattan in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He has published sixteen books--including The Mezzani…
French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He reje…
Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more ac…
Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell was born in India in 1925. His elder siblings are Lawrence Durrell, Leslie Durrell, and Margaret Durrell. His family settled on Corfu when Gerald was a boy and he spent …
Richard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important…
Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic and aesthetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film…
Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Netw…
Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in …
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He …
Paul William Gallico was born in New York City, on 26th July, 1897. His father was an Italian, and his mother came from Austria; they emigrated to New York in 1895.
José de Sousa Saramago (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony…
Robert Phillip Kolker, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. He is author of A Cinema of Loneliness, The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitc…
