English crime writer born in Ealing, London, as the daughter of Herbert John Allingham and his wife and cousin Emily Jane Hughes. Both parents were writers and journalists who regularly contributed to various weekly magazines. Herbert John was the editor of the New London Journal as well as the Christian Globe.
Margery Allingham grew up in Essex as the oldest of three children. She was...

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Honoré de Balzac was born Honoré Balzac in Tours, France, to a civil servant and his wife who was 30 years his junior. He added the aristocratic "de" in 1831. After sporadically attending the Oratorian grammar school in Vendôme, he moved with his family to Paris in 1814, and in 1816 Balzac began to read law at the Sorbonne. Around this time, he had discovered literature, and he was given pe...

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The Norwegian author and Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark. Her mother was Danish. Already in 1884, the family moved to Oslo, or Christiania as the city was called at the time, where her father, the noted Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Undset, got a position at the university. Her father, who was closest to Sigrid, gave her an early foundation for her interest in...

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Boris Akunin is the pseudonym of the Russian writer and translator Grigory Chkhartishvili of Georgian-Jewish origin. He was born in Zestaponi, Georgian USSR. His father was an officer and his mother a teacher. When Chkhartishvili was two years old, the family left Georgia and moved to Moscow where he grew up and attended school, majoring in English. Having become fascinated by Japanese culture...

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The Danish author Dorthe Nors was born in Herning on the island of Jutland. Her family moved to rural Sinding-Ørre Sogn when she was four years old. Her mother was an artist and her father a carpenter. Nors and her two older brothers grew up in a home dedicated to the evangelical Lutheran missionary organisation Indre Mission and the ideas of the pastor and teacher Grundtvig.
Even as a very ...

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