Graham Chapman was an English comedian, actor, writer, physician and one of the six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe. He was also the lead actor in their two narrative films, playing King Art…
Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Dra…
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983–2015, and for the apocalyptic come…
Ben Elton was born on 3 May 1959, in Catford, South London. The youngest of four, he went to Godalming Grammar School, joined amateur dramatic societies and wrote his first play at 15. He wanted to be…
Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) is considered one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. The author of numerous acclaimed short stories and novels, among them the classics M…
David Morrell is a Canadian novelist from Kitchener, Ontario, who has been living in the United States for a number of years. He is best known for his debut 1972 novel First Blood, which would later b…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Charles Burns is an American cartoonist and illustrator. Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His comic book work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly magazine 'RAW' in the mid-19…
Born in Chicago, Gorey came from a colourful family; his parents, Helen Dunham Garvey and Edward Lee Gorey, divorced in 1936 when he was 11, then remarried in 1952 when he was 27. One of his step-moth…
Joseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now …
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton…
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used non…
Bernard "Bernie" Sanders is the senior United States Senator from Vermont, elected on November 7, 2006. Before becoming Senator, Sanders represented Vermont's at-large district in the United States Ho…
Terence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan, known as Spike, was a comedian, writer and musician. He was of Irish descent, but spent most of his childhood in India and lived most of his later life in England, …
Smedley Darlington Butler was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps, an outspoken critic of U.S. military adventurism, and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Duri…
Jean-Christophe Grangé est un journaliste, reporter international, écrivain, scénariste né le 15 juillet 1961 à Boulogne-Billancourt. Il est l'un des rares écrivains français dans le domaine du thrill…
Tim Curry is a Tony award-nominated actor who’s worked in the entertainment industry for close to five decades. He is best known for his iconic roles in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Clue, It, The…
I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex.
Michael Nesmith's career in music and television took him from starring in The Monkees to a celebrated run of albums as a solo artist and in the First National Band. He created the TV show Popclips, a…
Edna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. …
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generatio…
John Wood Campbell, Jr. was an influential figure in American science fiction. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later called Analog Science Fiction and Fact), from late 1937 until his death, h…
Yasuhiko Nishizawa was born in 1960 in Akashi, Japan. He studied Creative Writing in the United States, before returning to Japan and beginning to write murder mysteries while working as a university …