John Robert Fowles was born in a middle-class family in the Essex town of Leigh-on-Sea. His father, Robert Fowles, dreamt of a career in the legal profession, but when the First World War broke out he was instead forced to take over the family's tobacco business. His mother, Gladys May, was a housewife. Fowles grew up in the security of a terraced housing estate, but later in life he confessed...

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Maria Lang is the pen name of the teacher and head mistress Dagmar (Maria) Lange, one of Sweden’s most popular, but also most criticised, crime novelists. Lange and Stieg Trenter dominated the Swedish crime fiction scene in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the media they were referred to as King Stieg and Queen Maria. Dagmar Lange was born in Västerås. The family moved to Lindesberg in 1915 where her fathe...

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Octavio Paz is regarded as one of the foremost authors of the 20th century. He was born in Mixcoac near Mexico City the same year as the two leaders of the radical peasant movement, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, entered the capital. Paz's father, a lawyer, supported the revolutionary leader Zapata. Although his family was less affluent during the revolution than they had once been, Paz was...

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Spanish author of essays, short stories and novels born in Barcelona, Catalonia. He studied law and journalism at university. At the end of the 1960s he contributed to the film magazine Fotograms and to Destino, from 1937 to 1980 the organ for intellectual Catalans who supported an independent Catalonia, who were exiled to the Basque Country from 1936 to 1939 and who were regularly censored...

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