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  • It is 77 years today since Sara Paretsky was born.

    The American author Sara Paretsky was a leading proponent – alongside Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton and others – during a period in the 1980s and ‘90s when crime fiction by and about women came to the fore in the United States. She was born in Ames, Iowa, but moved with her family to Kansas in 1951 where they were harassed by the authorities on account of being Jewish. Her scientist father was a stri...

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  • It is 121 years today since Marguerite Yourcenar was born.

    French author of Belgian origin, born in Brussels. Her mother died the same year due to puerperal fever. Marguerite was raised alone by the father, the Frenchman Michel de Crayencourt, an aristocratic cosmopolitan who loved women and to play high. He was also an educated man who gave his daughter a both classical and individualistic education. Together with him, she discovered England and Italy,...

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  • It is 59 years today since Karin Alvtegen was born.

    Karin Alvtegen was born in Huskvarna in the Swedish province of Småland. Her parents were teachers. She specialised in music at upper-secondary school and later worked as props manager at Jönköping County Theatre. She claims she never dreamt of writing books, although her maternal grandfather, brother of Astrid Lindgren, was an author. Karin Alvtegen moved to Stockholm in 1985 where she co...

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  • It is 61 years today since Lutz Seiler was born.

    The German poet Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thüringen, in the GDR. When the villages where he spent his first years were razed to the ground as a result of uranium mining, the family moved back to Ger. Seiler trained as an artisan and then worked as a carpenter and mason. After military service he pursued German studies in Halle and East Berlin, graduating in 1990. As of 1997, he is head of ...

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  • It is 66 years today since James Lasdun was born.

    English author and poet, born and brought up in London, but has lived in the USA since 1986. James Lasdun gained a B.A. degree at the University of Bristol in 1979, and worked as a publisher’s reader and a literary critic for, among others, Harper's, New York Times, Granta, London Review of Books and The Guardian. In 1987, he started to teach primarily Creative Writing at various universities in t...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait of Connie Palmen

Palmen, Connie
1955 -

Dutch author born to a Catholic family in Sint Odiliënberg, the Netherlands. In 1978, she went to Amsterdam to study ...

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Portrait image of Maria Lang

Lang, Maria
1914 - 1991

Maria Lang is the pen name of the teacher and head mistress Dagmar (Maria) Lange, one of Sweden’s most popular, but also m...

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Portrait image of Mark Billingham

Billingham, Mark
1961 -

The British author Mark Philip David Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, and grew up near Birmingham where he...

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Portrait image of Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Davis, Dorothy Salisbury
1916 - 2014

The American crime writer Dorothy Salisbury Davis was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted by an older childless couple,...

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