Alice Malsenior Walker (Authors)

was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, USA, is an African American author and poet. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul (Authors)

The British writer, born in Trinidad, V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul was born in 1932 in Chaguanas, close to the Port of Spain on Trinidad, in a family descended from immigrants from the north of India. His grandfather worked in a sugar cane plantation and his father was a journalist and writer. At the age of 18 Naipaul travelled to England where, after studying at University College at Oxford, he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1953. From then on he continued to live in England (since the 70s in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge) but he has also spent a great deal of time travelling in Asia, Africa and America. Apart from a few years in the middle of the 1950s, when he was employed by the BBC as a free-lance journalist, he has devoted himself entirely to his writing.

Voltaire (Authors-Reformers)

Francois-Marie Arouet (November 21, 1694-May 30, 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, deist and philosopher. Voltaire was born in Paris to Francois Arouet and Marie-Marguerite Daumart or D’Aumard. Both parents were of Poitevin extraction, but the Arouets were long established in Paris, the grandfather being a prosperous tradesman.

Emile Zola (Authors)

born on April 2, 1840 & died on September 29, 1902, was an influential French novelist, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

Arundhati Roy (Authors)

was born on 24 November 1961 in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, is an Indian novelist, essayist and activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays. Her writings on various social, environmental and political issues have been a subject of major controversy in India.

Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (Authors)

He was the widely famous creator of the devil-may-care heroes, The Three Musketeers (1844). He was born in france in 1802. His father , Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie rose from the rank of a private to commander-in-chief of the western pyrenees in France . His father could crush a steel helmet in between his hands or a horse between his legs.

Albert Camus (Authors)

(November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of existentialism. Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria to a French Algerian (pied noir) settler family. His mother was of Spanish extraction. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne in 1914 during the First World War. Camus lived in poor conditions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers.

Al Alvarez (Authors)

was born in London 1929. Alvarez was educated at Oundle School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was poetry critic of The Observer from 1956 to 1966 and is a poet and novellist, but some of his most famous works are in the realm of non-fiction: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide; and Biggest Game in Town, about poker players.

Jane Austen (Authors)

was born in Steventon, Hampshire on 16th December 1775. She was the 7th daughter of an 8 child family.Jane Austen was the author of several enduringly popular English novels, including: Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (Authors)

(July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation". He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Leo Tolstoy (Authors)

Born in 1828, Leo Tolstoy came from an aristocratic Russian family with links to some of the most powerful Russian families. He was the fourth cousin of Alexander Pushkin.Leo Tolstoy was one of the world's pre-eminent writers becoming famous through his epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Oscar Wilde (Author)

was born on 16th October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. His parents were well known and attracted a degree of gossip for their extravagant lifestyles. In 1964, his father Wille Wilde was knighted for his services to medicine. However his pride in receiving this honour was overshadowed by an allegation of rape by one of his patients. Although never proved, it cast a shadow over William Wilde.

Samuel Johnson (Authors)

(often referred to as Dr Johnson) (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December 1784) was an English author. Beginning as a Grub Street journalist, he made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, novelist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and political conservative, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature":

François-Marie Arouet (Authors)

"Love truth, but pardon error."

(21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, and philosopher known for his wit, philosophical sport, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade.

George Orwell (Authors)

(25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) has proved to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential and thought provoking writers. His relatively small numbers of books have created intense literary and political criticism. Orwell was a socialist, but at the same time he did not fit into any neat ideology. At times, he exasperated the more doctrinaire left wingers with his enthusiasm for taking opposing views. He was foremost a political writer, but for Orwell his object was not to promote a certain point of view, but to arrive at the truth; exposing the hypocrisy and injustice prevalent in society.

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen, (April 2, 1805 - August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet famous for his fairy tales.

Upbringing

Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on the April 2, 1805. He was the son of a sickly young shoemaker of twenty-two and his several years older wife. The whole family lived and slept in one little room.

Hans Christian showed imagination early, which was fostered by the indulgence of his parents and by his mother's superstition. In 1816, the shoemaker died and the child was left entirely to his own devices. Hans Christian ceased to go to school.    

Daphne Du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier (May 13, 1907 - April 19, 1989) was one of the most successful Cornish novelists of all time. Her best-known work, Rebecca (1938), is a literary classic and was the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film.

She was born in London in 1907, the daughter of the actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, and granddaughter of the author George Du Maurier. These gave a head start to her literary career, and her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931.

Although married for many years to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick "Boy" Browning and the mother of one son and two daughters, du Maurier undoubtedly had lesbian tendencies, and had intimate relationships with several women, including Gertrude Lawrence.

Her writing went from strength to strength. She is most noted for the novel Rebecca which has been filmed on several occasions. Besides Rebecca, several of her other novels were made into films, including Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1942), and My Cousin Rachel (1951). The Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds is based on a treatment of one of her short stories, as is the film Don't Look Now. She also wrote non-fiction. One of her most imaginative works, The Glass-Blowers, traces her French ancestry.

She was named a Dame of the British Empire, and died in 1989, at her home in Cornwall, in a region which had been the setting for many of her books. As per her desire, Dame Daphne's body was cremated and her ashes were scattered on the cliffs near her home.

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 - June 9, 1870), pen-name "Boz", was an English novelist of the Victorian era. The popularity of his books during his lifetime and to the present is demonstrated by the fact that none of his novels has ever gone out of print.

Childhood

Charles was born in Portsmouth, England, to John Dickens, a naval pay clerk, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow. When Charles was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. When he was ten, the family relocated to Camden Town in London.    

His early years were an idyllic time for him. He described himself then as a “very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of-boy”. He spent his time in the out-doors, reading voraciously with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked in later life of his extremely strong memories of childhood and his continuing photographic memory of people and events help bring his fiction to life.

Anthony Horowitz Biography

Anthony Horowitz (born April 5, 1955) is a British author and television scriptwriter. His most successful work has included creating and writing the series Foyle's War for ITV and writing several episodes of another ITV series, Midsomer Murders. Both of these are detective murder mystery series. He is also the author of the highly successful Alex Rider series of adventure novels for children.

He began writing for television in the 1980s, contributing to Granada Television's anthology series Dramarama, and also writing for the popular fantasy series Robin of Sherwood. His association with murder mysteries began with the adaptation of several Hercule Poirot stories for ITV's popular Agatha Christie's Poirot series during the 1990s.

Often his work has a comic edge, such as with the comic murder anthology Murder Most Horrid (BBC TWO, 1991) and the comedy-drama The Last Englishman (1995), starring Jim Broadbent. In 2001 he created a drama anthology series of his own for the BBC, Murder in Mind, an occasional series which deals with a different set of characters and a different murder every one-hour episode.

He is also less-favourably known for the creation of two short-lived and generally derided science-fiction shows, Crime Traveller (1997) for BBC ONE and The Vanishing Man (pilot 1996, series 1998) for ITV. The successful launch of the Second World War-set detective series Foyle's War in 2002 helped to restore his reputation as one of Britain's foremost writers of popular drama.

He is also the writer of a feature film screenplay, The Gathering, which was released in 2002 and starred Christina Ricci.

Wallace Stevens

(October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", all of which appear in his Collected Poems for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.