Richard Cobb was a British historian. He became Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, after an initially unconventional academic career in which he spent a dozen years working as an…
ROBERT HARRIS is the author of nine best-selling novels: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost Writer, Conspirata, The Fear Index, and An Officer and a Spy. Several of his books …
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor i…
Ryszard Kapuściński debuted as a poet in Dziś i jutro at the age of 17 and has been a journalist, writer, and publicist. In 1964 he was appointed to the Polish Press Agency and began traveling around …
Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. …
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional d…
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…
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times…
Stefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Am…
Tove Jansson was born and died in Helsinki, Finland. As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally writ…
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as …
Dora Jessie Saint MBE née Shafe (born 17 April 1913), best known by the pen name Miss Read, was an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress. Her pseudonym was derived from her mother's maiden …
Belle, who also writes contemporary fiction as Alice Marlow, always wanted to be an author. As a child the books she read were adventure stories like "Treasure Island," "Swallows and Amazons," and the…
Philip MacDonald (who some give as 1896 or 1899 as his date of birth) was the grandson of the writer George MacDonald and son of the author Ronald MacDonald and the actress Constance Robertson.
GEOFFREY WELLUM, a veteran of the Battle of Britain, was the youngest fighter pilot (at 18) in the Royal Air Force (RAF) to have fought in that battle.
"Aged seventeen, he signed up on a short-service …
Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall, UK in 1972. He is possessed of two explosively exciting eyebrows, which exert an almost hypnotic attraction over small children, dogs, and - thankfully - one ludicr…
Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She atte…
Mick Herron was born in Newcastle and has a degree in English from Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of nine books in the Slough House series as well as a mystery series set in Oxford featurin…
Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway novels take for their inspiration Elly's husband, who gave up a city job to train as an archaeologist, and her aunt who lives on the Norfolk coast and who filled her niec…
Mavis Doriel Hay (1894-1979), who in early life lived in north London, was a novelist, who fleetingly lit up the golden age of British crime fiction. She attended St Hilda's, Oxford, around about the …
David McCloskey is the author of the novels Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor, and The Persian, and is cohost of the podcast The Rest Is Classified. A former CIA analyst, he worked at Lang…
Sally Smith spent all her working life as a barrister and later King's Counsel in the Inner Temple. After writing a biography of the famous Edwardian barrister, Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC, she retire…
