Alexander Frater
Alexander Frater has contributed to various UK publications--Miles Kington called him "the funniest man who wrote for Punch since the war"--and been a contracted New Yorker writer; as chief travel correspondent of the London Observer he won an unprecedented number of British Press Travel Awards. Two of his books, Beyond the Blue Horizon and Chasing the Monsoon, have been been into major BBC television films. One, the Last Aftican Flying Bat (based on the former), took the Bafta award for best single documentary, while a programme for BBC Radio 4 (about his South Seas birthplace) was named overall winner of the Travelex Travel Writers' Awards. He lives in London, though, whenever time and money allow, is likely to be found skulking deep in t
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Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was an English singer and actress who achieved popularity in the 1960s with the release of her UK top 5 single "As Tears Go By" and became one of the leading female artists of the British Invasion in the United States.
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Born in Hampstead, London, Faithfull began her career in 1964 after attending a party for the Rolling Stones, where she was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham. Her 1965 debut studio album Marianne Faithfull, released simultaneously with her studio album Come My Way, was a huge success and was followed by further albums on Decca Records. From 1966 to 1970 she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with Mick Jagger. Her popularity was enhanced by roles in films, including I'll Never Forg -
Vladimir Nabokov
Russian: Владимир Набоков .
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian-American novelist. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made significant contributions to lepidoptery, and had a big interest in chess problems.
Nabokov's Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as his most important novel, and is at any rate his most widely known one, exhibiting the love of intricate wordplay and descriptive detail that characterized all his works.
Lolita was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked 53rd on the same list, and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), was listed ei -
Anthony Burgess
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He e -
William Boyd
Note: William^^Boyd
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Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.
At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he re -
H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
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Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mir -
Poppy Z. Brite
Poppy Z. Brite (born Melissa Ann Brite, now going by Billy Martin) is an American author born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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Born a biological female, Brite has written and talked much about his gender dysphoria/gender identity issues. He self-identifies almost completely as a homosexual male rather than female, and as of 2011 has started taking testosterone injections. His male name is Billy Martin.
He lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Athens, Georgia prior to returning to New Orleans in 1993. He loves UNC basketball and is a sometime season ticket holder for the NBA, but he saves his greatest affection for his hometown football team, the New Orleans Saints.
Brite and husband Chris DeBarr, a chef, run a de facto cat rescue and have, at any -
Paul Theroux
Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travelogue writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.
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He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew. -
James Baldwin
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France -
Martin Amis
Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.
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The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness." -
Blake Morrison
Blake Morrison was educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995.
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A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. His best-known works are probably his two memoirs, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" and "Things My Mother Never Told Me."
Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. He lives in s -
Ambrose Bierce
died perhaps 1914
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Caustic wit and a strong sense of horror mark works, including In the Midst of Life (1891-1892) and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), of American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce.
People today best know this editorialist, journalist, and fabulist for his short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and his lexicon.
The informative sardonic view of human nature alongside his vehemence as a critic with his motto, "nothing matters," earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce."
People knew Bierce despite his reputation as a searing critic, however, to encourage younger poet George Sterling and fiction author W.C. Morrow.
Bierce employed a distinctive style especially in his stories. This style often embraces an abrupt begin -
Virginia Lee Burton
Virginia Lee Burton was an American illustrator and children's book author. Burton produced seven self-illustrated children's books. She married Boston Museum school sculptor, George Demetrios, with whom she had two sons and lived in Folly Cove, Gloucester. She died at 59.
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Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
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Redmond O'Hanlon
Redmond O'Hanlon is a British author, born in 1947. Mr. O'Hanlon has become known for his journeys into some of the most remote jungles of the world, in Borneo, the Amazon basin and Congo. He has also written a harrowing account of a trip to the North Atlantic on a trawler.
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Laurie Lee
Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE, was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). While the first volume famously recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley, the second deals with his leaving home for London and his first visit to Spain in 1934, and the third with his return in December 1937 to join the Republican International Brigade.
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Barry Humphries
John Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James's. He was a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter.
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Colin Thubron
Colin Thubron, CBE FRSL is a Man Booker nominated British travel writer and novelist.
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In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, as of 2010, President of the Royal Society of Literature. -
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (1907-2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. She cultivated a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly played strong-willed, sophisticated women. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer.
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In the 1940s Hepburn was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.
Hepburn challenged herself in the latter half of her -
Gavin Young
Gavin David Young (24 April 1928 – 18 January 2001) was a journalist and travel writer.
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He was born in Bude, Cornwall, England. His father, Gavin Young, was a lieutenant colonel in the Welsh Guards. Daphne, his mother, was the daughter of Sir Charles Leolin Forestier-Walker, Bt, of Monmouthshire. Young spent most of his youth in Cornwall and South Wales. He graduated from Oxford University, where he studied modern history.
Young spent two years with the Ralli Brothers shipping company in Basra in Iraq before living with the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He fashioned his experiences into a book, Return to the Marshes (1977). In 1960, from Tunis, he joined The Observer of London as a foreign correspondent -
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.
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Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer". -
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).
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His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simpl -
Mark Tully
Sir William Mark Tully was the Chief of Bureau for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in New Delhi for 22 years. Schooled in England, he stayed mostly in India covering all major incidents in South Asia during his tenure. He was made an Officer of The Order of the British Empire in 1985 and was awarded the Padma Shree in 1992, a rare distinction for a non-Indian. He was knighted in the 2002 New Year Honours. In 2005 he received the Padma Bhushan.
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Dirk Bogarde
Dirk Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde was born of mixed Flemish, Dutch and Scottish ancestry, and baptised on 30 October 1921 at St. Mary's Church, Kilburn. His father, Ulric van den Bogaerde (born in Perry Barr, Birmingham; 1892–1972), was the art editor of The Times and his mother, Margaret Niven (1898–1980), was a former actress. He attended University College School, the former Allan Glen's School in Glasgow (a time he described in his autobiography as unhappy, although others have disputed his account) and later studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. He began his acting career on stage in 1939, shortly before the start of World War II.
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Bogarde served in World War II, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regimen -
Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was an English singer and actress who achieved popularity in the 1960s with the release of her UK top 5 single "As Tears Go By" and became one of the leading female artists of the British Invasion in the United States.
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Born in Hampstead, London, Faithfull began her career in 1964 after attending a party for the Rolling Stones, where she was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham. Her 1965 debut studio album Marianne Faithfull, released simultaneously with her studio album Come My Way, was a huge success and was followed by further albums on Decca Records. From 1966 to 1970 she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with Mick Jagger. Her popularity was enhanced by roles in films, including I'll Never Forg -
Edgar Allan Poe
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
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Just as the bizarre c -
Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران ) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer.
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Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon (then part of Ottoman Mount Lebanon), as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career. In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His romantic style was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, especially prose poetry, breaking away from the classical school. In Lebanon, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.
He is chiefly known in the English-speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet, an early example of inspirational fiction including a series of philosophical essays written -
Asako Yuzuki
Asako Yuzuki (柚木 麻子, Yuzuki Asako) is a Japanese writer. She won the All Yomimono Prize for New Writers and the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize. Asako has been nominated multiple times for the Naoki Prize, and her novels have been adapted for television, radio, and film.
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Barry Humphries
John Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James's. He was a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter.
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Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (1907-2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Known for her headstrong independence and spirited personality, Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned more than 60 years. She cultivated a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly played strong-willed, sophisticated women. Her work came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and she received four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer.
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In the 1940s Hepburn was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 25 years, and produced nine movies.
Hepburn challenged herself in the latter half of her