Born Elizabeth Gwynne, she was of mixed English and Irish ancestry, and came from a rather grand background, growing up in the 17th-century Sussex manor house, Wootton Manor. Her parents were Rupert G…
William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that …
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including hi…
Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Didion's career began in the 1950…
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company execut…
Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing pro…
John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of h…
Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascina…
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 …
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the fir…
Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction review…
Harold James McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the …
Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the…
Bernard "Bernie" Sanders is the senior United States Senator from Vermont, elected on November 7, 2006. Before becoming Senator, Sanders represented Vermont's at-large district in the United States Ho…
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics col…
Anna Del Conte (born 1925 in Milan, Italy) is the doyenne of Italian cookery. Her books include the acclaimed Portrait of Pasta, Gastronomy of Italy and Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes. She won th…
Actor Stanley Tucci was born on November 11, 1960, in Peekskill, New York. He is the son of Joan (Tropiano), a writer, and Stanley Tucci, an art teacher. His family is Italian-American, with origins i…
Daphne du Maurier was born on 13 May 1907 at 24 Cumberland Terrace, Regent's Park, London, the middle of three daughters of prominent actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and actress Muriel, née Beaumo…
Nasce a Roma e si laurea in Filosofia all'Università degli studi di Milano con Paolo Valore (con una tesi riguardo agli argomenti ontologici a sostegno dell'esistenza di Dio). Lavora come traduttore a…
The Reverend Richard Coles (born 26 March 1962) is a Church of England priest, broadcaster, writer and musician. Richard Coles was born in Northampton, England and educated at the independent Wellingb…
P. D. James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England—died November 27, 2014, Oxford), British mystery novelist best kn…
Patrick Bringley is the New York Times bestselling author of ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD, a memoir about his ten years working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s adapted the book into …
