Miss Read
Dora Jessie Saint MBE née Shafe (born 17 April 1913), best known by the pen name Miss Read, was an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress. Her pseudonym was derived from her mother's maiden name. In 1940 she married her husband, Douglas, a former headmaster. The couple had a daughter, Jill. She began writing for several journals after World War II and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC.
She wrote a series of novels from 1955 to 1996. Her work centred on two fictional English villages, Fairacre and Thrush Green. The principal character in the Fairacre books, "Miss Read", is an unmarried schoolteacher in a small village school, an acerbic and yet compassionate observer of village life. Miss Read's novels are wry regional social com
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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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Caleb Carr
Caleb Carr was an American novelist and military historian. The son of Lucien Carr, a former UPI editor and a key Beat generation figure, he was born in Manhattan and lived for much of his life on the Lower East Side. He attended Kenyon College and New York University, earning a B.A. in military and diplomatic history. He was a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and wrote frequently on military and political affairs.
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Carol Ryrie Brink
Born Caroline Ryrie, American author of over 30 juvenile and adult books. Her novel Caddie Woodlawn won the 1936 Newbery Medal.
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Brink was orphaned by age 8 and raised by her maternal grandmother, the model for Caddie Woodlawn. She started writing for her school newspapers and continued that in college. She attended the University of Idaho for three years before transferring to the University of California in 1917, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1918, the same year she married.
Anything Can Happen on the River, Brink's first novel, was published in 1934. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Idaho in 1965. Brink Hall, which houses the UI English Department and faculty offices, is named in her honor. Th -
Flora Thompson
Flora Jane Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet famous for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford.
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Flora benefited from good access to books when the public library opened in Winton, in 1907. Not long after, in 1911, she won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen.[6] She later wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was a keen self-taught naturalist and many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986.
Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, which she sent as essays to Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published soon after. She -
Christopher Ingraham
Christopher Ingraham is a reporter for the Washington Post, where he writes about all things data, with a particular interest in gun policy and drug policy. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.
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Bill Richardson
Bill Richardson was born and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba on a quiet little street. He admits to being a shy kid, a quality that has carried over into his adulthood. With his two brothers and the neighborhood children, Bill would play hide and seek, red rover and tag. They got into the usual sorts of mischief: garden raids and snowball fights.
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Bill has always taken comfort in reading. As a child his tastes were very diverse, ranging from the adventures of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the Happy Hollisters, and the Enid Blyton books to comics featuring Archie, Richie Rich, Little Lulu, Casper, Batman and Superman. The Alice in Wonderland books were favorites, and he still loves them today.
Bill’s parents also influenced his reading habits at -
Noel Streatfeild
Mary Noel Streatfeild, known as Noel Streatfeild, was an author best known and loved for her children's books, including Ballet Shoes and Circus Shoes. She also wrote romances under the pseudonym Susan Scarlett .
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She was born on Christmas Eve, 1895, the daughter of William Champion Streatfeild and Janet Venn and the second of six children to be born to the couple. Sister Ruth was the oldest, after Noel came Barbara, William ('Bill'), Joyce (who died of TB prior to her second birthday) and Richenda. Ruth and Noel attended Hastings and St. Leonard's Ladies' College in 1910. As an adult, she began theater work, and spent approximately 10 years in the theater.
During the Great War, in 1915 Noel worked first as a volunteer in a soldier's hospi -
E.M. Delafield
Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (9 June 1890 – 2 December 1943), commonly known as E. M. Delafield, was a prolific English author who is best-known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s, and its sequels in which the Provincial Lady buys a flat in London and travels to America. Other sequels of note are her experiences looking for war-work during the Phoney War in 1939, and her experiences as a tourist in the Soviet Union.
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Daughter of the novelist Mrs. Henry De La Pasture. -
D.E. Stevenson
There is more than one author with this name
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Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.
D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like E.F. Benson, Ann Bridge, O. Douglas or Dorothy L. Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. -
Penelope Farmer
Penelope Jane Farmer is an English fiction writer well known for children's fantasy novels. Her best-known novel is Charlotte Sometimes (1969), a boarding-school story that features a multiple time slip.
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Rumer Godden
Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951.
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A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh. -
George Grossmith
George Grossmith was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines. Grossmith is best remembered for two aspects of his career. First, he created a series of nine memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance (1880) and Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1885–87). Second, he wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel Diary of a Nobody.
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Gros -
Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Dorothy Evelyn Smith was born in Derby, England, the daughter of a Methodist parson. She first began to write successfully for English magazines while her husband was serving in the First World War. Thereafter her short stories and articles steadily reached a wide market, though her work was subject to interruptions from her growing daughter and son and their prodigious number of pets. In 1939, when most English magazines went off the market, Mrs. Smith began her first novel, interrupted this time by her war work. Often she wrote "on the end of the kitchen table with bombs falling around the house," and part of her first novel was finished while she was confined to bed with an injured leg.
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Now that peace had come, Mrs. Smith wrote in her own -
Jane Langton
Langton was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied astronomy at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1944. She received an M.A. in art history from the University of Michigan in 1945, and another M.A. from Radcliffe College in 1948. She studied at the Boston Museum School from 1958 to 1959.
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In 1961 Langton wrote and illustrated her first book for children, The Majesty of Grace, a story about a young girl during the Depression who is certain she will some day be Queen of England. Langton has since written a children's series, The Hall Family Chronicles, and the Homer Kelly murder mystery novels. She has also written several stand-alone novels and picture books.
Langton's novel The Fledgling is -
John Masefield
Masefield was born in Ledbury, a rural area in England to George Masefield, a solicitor and Caroline. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was only 6 and he went to live with his aunt. His father died soon after. After an unhappy education at the King's School in Warwick (now known as Warwick School), where he was a boarder between 1888 and 1891, he left to board the HMS Conway, both to train for a life at sea, and to break his addiction to reading, of which his Aunt thought little. He spent several years aboard this ship and found that he could spend much of his time reading and writing. It was aboard the Conway that Masefield’s love for story-telling grew.
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In 1894, Masefield boarded the Gilcruix, destined for Chile. H -
Joan Aiken
Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories.
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She was born in Rye, East Sussex, into a family of writers, including her father, Conrad Aiken (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry), and her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge. She worked for the United Nations Information Office during the second world war, and then as an editor and freelance on Argosy magazine before she started writing full time, mainly children's books and thrillers. For her books she received the Guardian Award (1969) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972).
Her most popular series, the "Wolves Chronicles" which began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase -
Pat Ennis
Dr. Pat Ennis (Patricia A. Ennis) taught Home Economics for the San Diego Unified School District before developing and establishing the Home Economics Department at Christian Heritage College located in El Cajon, California at the request of Dr. Tim LaHaye. She moved to The Master’s College in 1987, at the invitation of Dr. John MacArthur, to establish the Home Economics-Family and Consumer Science Department. Relocation to the College at Southwestern Baptist Theological occurred in 2011. Currently she is the Director of Homemaking Programs and Distinguished Professor at Southwestern.
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Lillian Beckwith
Lilian Comber wrote fiction and non-fiction for both adults and children under the pseudonym Lillian Beckwith. She is best known for her series of comic novels based on her time living on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides.
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Beckwith was born in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, in 1916, where her father ran a grocery shop. The shop provided the background for her memoir About My Father's Business, a child’s eye view of a 1920s family. She moved to the Isle of Skye with her husband in 1942, and began writing fiction after moving to the Isle of Man with her family twenty years later. She also completed a cookery book, Secrets from a Crofter’s Kitchen (Arrow, 1976).
Since her death, Beckwith’s novel A Shine of Rainbows has been made into a film starring A -
Chris Priestley
His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”.
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He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Str -
Eileen Dunlop
Eileen Dunlop has lived in Scotland all her life. Born in Alloa, 13 October 1938, she was educated at Alloa Academy and Moray House College, Edinburgh.
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Emma Lathen
Aka R.B. Dominic
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Emma Lathen is the pen name of two American businesswomen: an attorney Mary Jane Latsis (July 12, 1927 -October 29, 1997) and an economic analyst Martha Henissart (b. 1929),who received her B.A. in physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1950.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/31/boo... -
Gervase Phinn
Gervase Phinn (born 27 December 1946, Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England) is an English author and educator. After a career as a teacher he became a schools inspector.
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He is now a freelance lecturer, broadcaster and writer, a consultant for the Open University, Honorary Fellow of St. John's College, York, Doctor of Letters (D.Litt) of the University of Leicester, Doctor of Letters (D.Litt) of The University of Hull and the Fellow and Visiting Professor of Education at The University of Teesside.
In 2005 the highest academic award of Sheffield Hallam University, Doctor of the University (D.Univ.) was conferred upon him by the Chancellor, Professor Lord Robert Winston. In 2006 he became President of The School Library Association.
He has publ -
Michelle Magorian
British children's author Michelle Magorian - author of the celebrated Goodnight, Mr. Tom (1981), which won The Guardian Children's Fiction Prize - was born in Southsea, Portsmouth, in 1947. She trained to be an actress, studying at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, and at Marcel Marceau's L'école Internationale de Mime in Paris. While pursuing an acting career, Magorian became interested in children's books, writing her first novel for young readers (Goodnight, Mr. Tom) over the course of four and a half years.
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Reginald Arkell
Reginald Arkell was a British script writer and comic novelist who wrote many musical plays for the London theatre. The most popular of those was an adaptation of the spoof history book 1066 and All That: 1066—and all that: A Musical Comedy based on that Memorable History by Sellar and Yeatman.
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He was the author of A Cottage in the Country and the Green Fingers series of garden verse.
Arkell was born on 14 October 1882 at Lechlade, Gloucestershire, England, was educated at Burford Grammar School and trained as a journalist. He married actress Elizabeth Evans in 1912.
During the First World War he served with the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and The Norfolk Regiment. Arkell died on 1 May 1959 at Cricklade, England. -
Elizabeth von Arnim
Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Annette Beauchamp, was an English novelist. Born in Australia, she married a German aristocrat, and her earliest works are set in Germany. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth Russell, Countess Russell. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H.G. Wells, then later married Earl Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winner and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Though known in early life as May, her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to friends and finally to family. Her writings are ascribed to Elizabeth von Arni
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Barbara Pym
People know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as Excellent Women (1952), of English life.
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After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A -
D.E. Stevenson
There is more than one author with this name
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Dorothy Emily Stevenson was a best-selling Scottish author. She published more than 40 romantic novels over a period of more than 40 years. Her father was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.
D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like E.F. Benson, Ann Bridge, O. Douglas or Dorothy L. Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. -
Molly Clavering
AKA Marion Moffatt.
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Molly Clavering was born in Glasgow, but lived in the country from an early age. After six years' service wiith the WRNS, she settled in Moffat, Dumfriesshire, where she served on the Town Council. -
Vicki Myron
I was born in Spencer and grew up on a farm south of Moneta, Iowa—a town that no longer exists. I graduated from Hartley Iowa High School and moved to Mankato, Minnesota where I worked, married, had a daughter and went to college. I have a bachelor’s degree from Mankato State and a master’s from Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas. In 1982, I returned to Spencer, Iowa to begin working at the public library. In 1987, I was named Director of Spencer Public Library and I served in that position for 25 and ½ years. I retired in 2007 to write this book. I currently reside in Spencer.
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I love George Orwell, Frederick Feikema, and the Harry Potter series for fiction. I read all of Torey Hayden’s books about abused children and many other non-f -
Christian Birmingham
Christian Birmingham is a British illustrator and artist who has worked with children's writers including the Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo, on books including Whitbread Children's Book of the Year The Wreck of the Zanzibar and Smarties Prize winner The Butterfly Lion. He was also shortlisted for the Kurt Maschler Award and Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration.
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Birmingham graduated from Exeter College of Art and Design in 1991 with a first-class honours degree in Graphic Design (illustration). He won his first book illustration contract soon after leaving college and has since worked with major British and American publishers on titles including the centenary picturebook edition of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe -
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Rebecca Shaw
Sunday Times bestselling author Rebecca Shaw is known for her heartwarming tales of country life.
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Rebecca grew up in Yorkshire and attended a Quaker boarding school before becoming a teacher of deaf children.
She wrote 28 novels. Her biggest series of 19 books set in a fictional English village called TURNHAM MALPAS chart the lives and loves of the village inhabitants.
A further six novels tell the stories of the vets, veterinary nurses and animals at a veterinary practice in the fictional English market town of BARLEYBRIDGE.
She also wrote three standalone novels.
Rebecca lived with her husband in a beautiful Dorset village where she found plenty of inspiration for her contemporary stories about rural life. Rebecca sadly passed away in 2015, bu -
Elizabeth Berridge
Elizabeth Berridge grew up in the ‘safe London suburb’ of Wandsworth Common. A year in Switzerland and a ‘hateful’ period at the Bank of England, described in Be Clean, Be Tidy (1949), was followed by work in a photographic news agency. She married Reginald Moore in 1940, published her first short story in 1941 and, in 1943, after the birth of the first of her two children, moved to a remote house in Wales, where Moore edited Modern Reading and other wartime anthologies and she wrote the stories reprinted in Tell It to a Stranger – published as Selected Stories in 1947; they returned to London in 1950. Elizabeth Berridge published nine novels, Across the Common winning the Yorkshire Post Award for Best Novel of the Year in 1964. She reviewe
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Julie Tatham
Julie Campbell Tatham
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aka
Julie Campbell, Julie Tatham and Julie C. Tatham
Julie Tatham, née Campbell, took over the writing of the Cherry Ames series after World War II and repositioned Cherry as the heroine of a peacetime mystery series.
Tatham worked as the assistant society editor of the New York Evening Post before marrying Charles Tatham, though she later returned to the newspaper.
Subsequently, she worked as a secretary, a hotel hostess, and the head of her own literary agency. She wrote both the Trixie Belden and Ginny Gordon series, under the name Julie Campbell, eventually becoming a full-time writer.
Both those series were for younger readers; Trixie was especially successful, and was continued by ghostwriters long after Tatham left th -
Elizabeth Brooks
Elizabeth Brooks grew up in Chester. She read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. On graduating in 2001 she moved to the Isle of Man where she lives with her husband and their two children. Her first novel, 'Call of the Curlew' was shortlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award 2018. Her fourth novel, 'The Woman in the Sable Coat,' will be published by Tin House in March 2024.
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Rosalind Murray
Rosalind Murray (1890-1967) was the daughter of the well-known classical scholar Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary Howard. Brought up in Glasgow and Oxford, she was educated by governesses and at the progressive Priors Field School. She published her first novel, The Leading Note, in 1910 when she was 20, her second, Moonseed, in 1911 and her third, Unstable Ways, in 1914; this was the year after her marriage to the historian Arnold Toynbee, with whom she had three sons between 1914 and 1922. The Happy Tree came out in 1926; it was followed by another novel, Hard Liberty, and by a children’s history book. During the 1930s Rosalind Murray’s interests turned to theology; although brought up agnostic, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church
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Jack Sheffield
Jack Sheffield (born Jack Linley, 1945) is a British author who wrote a series of books of fiction about the headmaster of a village school in a fictional Yorkshire village. The stories are set from the late 1970s to the early 1980s and attempt to portray life in Yorkshire as it was at that time.
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He was trained as a teacher at St John's College, York and later became head teacher of two schools in North Yorkshire and then senior lecturer in primary education at Bretton Hall.
He took up writing after retirement, and his first novel "Teacher, Teacher!" sold 100,000 copies -
Joyce Dennys
JOYCE DENNYS was born 14th August 1883 in India. The Dennys family relocated to England in 1886. Dennys enjoyed drawing lessons throughout her schooling and later enrolled at Exeter Art School. In 1919 Dennys married Tom Evans, a young doctor, and they moved to Australia. While living in New South Wales, Dennys's work was constantly in print and exhibited in many galleries. In 1922 Joyce became a mother and moved back to England. Her drawing took second place to the domestic and social duties of a doctor's wife and mother and she became increasingly frustrated. She voiced her frustrations through the character of Henrietta, a heroine she created for an article for Sketch. Henrietta was to become so important to Dennys that she once remarke
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