Ben Waggoner

I've been studying Old Norse (close to modern Icelandic) in my copious spare time since about 2006. Now I translate, study, annotate, and periodically publish Old Norse sagas (longish prose narratives that come in a great many "genres"). Why? It's fun if you like that sort of thing, and someone has to do it. . . My focus has been on the fornaldarsögur or "sagas of olden time" -- legendary narratives set in Scandinavia, some of which transmit very old legendary material.

For the record, I am *not* the Ben Waggoner who's written books on video file compression. I'm sure he's a great guy, but he's not me.

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Mathias Nordvig

Dr. Mathias Nordvig is a visiting assistant professor of Nordic and Arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). He teaches subjects on Viking history, Nordic mythology, folklore, Arctic culture and society, and Danish language. Dr. Nordvig earned his PhD in Nordic mythology in 2014 at Aarhus University in Denmark, his native country. He moved to Colorado in 2015.

Dr. Nordvig has a BA. degree in Nordic languages and literatures with a minor in Viking Studies. His MA. degree includes studies in medieval Icelandic history and saga literature, Viking Age archaeology, Nordic mythology, and Old Norse language. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the relationship bet
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Jesse L. Byock

Jesse L. Byock is Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Feud in the Icelandic Saga (1982) Medieval Iceland (1990), The Saga of King Kraki (1998), and Viking Age Iceland (2001).
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Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson (also spelled Snorre Sturlason) was an Icelandic historian, poet and politician. He was twice elected lawspeaker at the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He was the author of the Prose Edda or Younger Edda, which consists of Gylfaginning ("the fooling of Gylfi"), a narrative of Norse mythology, the Skáldskaparmál, a book of poetic language, and the Háttatal, a list of verse forms. He was also the author of the Heimskringla, a history of the Norwegian kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egils saga.

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Donna Jo Napoli

Donna Jo Napoli is both a linguist and a writer of children's and YA fiction. She loves to garden and bake bread, and even dreams of moving to the woods and becoming a naturalist.

At various times her house and yard have been filled with dogs, cats, birds, and rabbits. For thirteen years she had a cat named Taxi, and liked to go outside and call, "Taxi!" to make the neighbors wonder. But dear dear Taxi died in 2009.

She has five children, seven grandchildren, and currently lives outside Philadelphia. She received her BA in mathematics in 1970 and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures in 1973, both from Harvard University, then did a postdoctoral year in Linguistics at MIT. She has since taught linguistics at Smith College, the Univ
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Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Valerio Massimo Manfredi is an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist and journalist. He was born in Piumazzo di Castelfranco Emilia, province of Modena and is married to Christine Fedderson Manfredi, who translates his published works from Italian to English. They have two children and live in a small town near Bologna.
Valerio Massimo Manfredi defines himself as an "Ancient World Topographer". Since 1978 he spends his time teaching in several European universities, digging ruins in the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, and writing novels.
The Professor of Classical Archaeology in the "Luigi Bocconi" University of Milan and a familiar face on European television, he has led scientific expeditions, excavations and explorations in Italy
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Daniel Pennac

Daniel Pennac (real name Daniel Pennacchioni) is a French writer. He received the Prix Renaudot in 2007 for his essay Chagrin d'école.

After studying in Nice he became a teacher. He began to write for children and then wrote his book series "La Saga Malaussène", that tells the story of Benjamin Malaussène, a scapegoat, and his family in Belleville, Paris.

His writing style can be humorous and imaginative like in "La Saga Malaussène", but he has also written essays, such as "Comme un roman", a pedagogic essay."La Débauche", written jointly with Jacques Tardi, treats the topic of unemployment, revealing his social preoccupations.
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Tzvetan Todorov

In Bulgarian Цветан Тодоров. Todorov was a Franco-Bulgarian historian, philosopher and literary theoretician. Among his most influential works is his theory on the fantastic, the uncanny and marvellous.
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Gunnar Gunnarsson

Gunnar Gunnarsson is one of Iceland's most esteemed writers. From a poor peasant background, Gunnar moved to Denmark in 1907 to get an education. He wrote mainly in Danish throughout his career, in order to reach a wider audience.
In 1955, he was considered for the Nobel Prize, the year in which it was awarded to his fellow countryman, Halldór Laxness.

For the Icelandic author born in 1947, see Gunnar Gunnarsson.
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Roy Lewis

There is more than one author with this name

The majority of the books that Lewis wrote or edited, often jointly, were nonfiction and closely related to his journalism. However, he is best known for his 1960 novel The Evolution Man, which went through six editions under a number of titles. This comic novel purports to be a first-hand account by the son of the first man to discover fire. To prevent further 'advances', the family takes matters in hand, leading to a conclusion given away by the book's eventual subtitle, 'how I ate my father'. Continuing authorship into old age, Lewis published a second novel in 1990, the same year that a play of his on William Shakespeare was performed in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe[1], followed by a novella
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Héctor Germán Oesterheld

Héctor Germán Oesterheld Puyol fue un guionista de historietas y escritor de relatos breves argentino de ciencia ficción y novelas

Seudónimos: H. Sturgiss, C. de la Vega, Francisco G. Vázquez, Germán Sturgiss, Héctor Sánchez Puyol, Joe Trigger, Patrick Hanson.

Nació en el año 1919 en Buenos Aires. Hijo de Ferdinand Kurt. Estudió y se graduó en la carrera de geología. Fanático de H. Melville y Joseph Conrad. A partir de 1950 cuando comienza a escribir guiones de historietas y relatos de aventuras.
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Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and soc
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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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Robert N. Charrette

Credited on some German editions as "Robert N. Charette".
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George R.R. Martin

George Raymond Richard "R.R." Martin was born September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was Raymond Collins Martin, a longshoreman, and his mother was Margaret Brady Martin. He has two sisters, Darleen Martin Lapinski and Janet Martin Patten.

Martin attended Mary Jane Donohoe School and Marist High School. He began writing very young, selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included. Later he became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines (amateur fan magazines). Martin's first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: The Hero, sold to Galaxy, published in February, 1971 issue. Other sales followed.

In 1970 Martin received a
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Neil Price

Neil Price is an English archaeologist specialising in the study of Viking Age Scandinavia and the archaeology of shamanism. He is currently a professor in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Born in south-west London, Price went on to gain a BA in Archaeology at the University of London, before writing his first book, The Vikings in Brittany, which was published in 1989. He undertook his doctoral research from 1988 through to 1992 at the University of York, before moving to Sweden, where he completed his PhD at the University of Uppsala in 2002. In 2001, he edited an anthology entitled The Archaeology of Shamanism for Routledge, and the following year published and defended his doctoral thesis, T
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Mario Rigoni Stern

Mario Rigoni Stern was an Italian author and World War II veteran.
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Roberto Saviano

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Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir

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Witold Szabłowski

Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist. At age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza’s weekly supplement, Duży Format, where he covered international stories in countries including Cuba, South Africa, and Iceland. His features on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the EU won the European Parliament Journalism Prize; his reportage on the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine won the Polish Press Agency’s Ryszard Kapuściński Award; and his book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won the Beata Pawlak Award and an English PEN award, and was nominated for the Nike Award, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize. Szabłowski lives in Warsaw.
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Thomas Williams

Thomas Williams is a historian of the early Middle Ages and a former curator at the British Museum’s Department of Coins and Medals (2017-2018). He worked as project curator for the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend (British Museum 2014) and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
In 2016 Thomas was awarded his PhD by UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. His thesis, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, investigated the relationship between landscape and warfare in early medieval Britain (c.450 – 1016). Prior to this he gained an MA with Distinction in Cultural Heritage Studies (UCL) with a prize-winning dissertation that explored the role of fantasy and medievalism in the modern interpretation
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun, which was the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Best of the Best” award; Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and the essays We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. Her most recent work is an essay about losing her father, Notes on Grief, and Mama’s Sleeping Scarf, a children’s book written as Nwa Grace-James. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she divides her time between the Unit
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Mathias Nordvig

Dr. Mathias Nordvig is a visiting assistant professor of Nordic and Arctic studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). He teaches subjects on Viking history, Nordic mythology, folklore, Arctic culture and society, and Danish language. Dr. Nordvig earned his PhD in Nordic mythology in 2014 at Aarhus University in Denmark, his native country. He moved to Colorado in 2015.

Dr. Nordvig has a BA. degree in Nordic languages and literatures with a minor in Viking Studies. His MA. degree includes studies in medieval Icelandic history and saga literature, Viking Age archaeology, Nordic mythology, and Old Norse language. He wrote his PhD dissertation on the relationship bet
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