John Coates was born in 1912 into a Yorkshire engineering family. He went to Haileybury and then read English at Cambridge, where he spent most of his time acting and writing plays and became Presiden…
Anne Inez McCaffrey was an American writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction (Best Novella, Weyr Search, 1968) and the …
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 Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well …
Julian Patrick Barnes is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, an…
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for…
The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based, and Some Must Watch (1933), on wh…
Sarah Waters is a British novelist. She is best known for her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, as well the novels that followed, including Affinity, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch.
Angela Margaret Mackail was born on January 30, 1890 at 27 Young Street, Kensington Square, London. Her grandfather was Sir Edward Burne-Jones the pre-Raphaelite painter and partner in the design fir…
Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a…
From the publisher: MONICA DICKENS, born in 1915, was brought up in London and was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. Her mother's German origins and her Catholicism gave her the detached eye…
Born in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first…
Isobel English is a pseudonym for the English writer born June Jolliffe. She married Ronald Orr-Ewing, one daughter born 1942. Divorced 1951, married Neville Braybrooke 1953. Wrote 3 novels plus short…
Denis George Mackail was born in Kensington, London to the writer John William Mackail and Margaret Burne-Jones, daughter of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. Educated at St Paul's School, Hammersmith, …
Sloane Crosley is the author of the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp, as well as three books of essays collections, most recently Look Alive Out There and the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told Th…
Tania James is the author of three works of fiction, most recently the novel The Tusk That Did the Damage (Knopf). Tusk was named a Best Book of 2015 by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and …
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…
AJ Pearce grew up in Hampshire in the south of England. She studied at the University of Sussex and Northwestern University. A chance discovery of a 1939 women's magazine became the inspiration for he…
James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successf…
Nicola Twilley is author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, June 2024), and co-host of the award-winning Gastropod podcast, which looks at food…
