Nora Waln

Descended from a line of Quakers and sea captains, Nora Waln was born to parents Thomas Lincoln and Lillian Waln. During childhood, she developed a fond interest of Chinese culture after learning of a family friendship with the Lin family resulting from trading in the early 1800’s. In 1919, she began attending Swarthmore College, a liberal arts college founded by Quakers, near Philadelphia. While studying at Swarthmore, Waln was contacted by two members of the Lin family, who were traveling in the United States. They invited her to visit at their Hopei Province homestead in China. During her junior year at Swarthmore, World War I broke out and Waln left school, before graduating.

In 1920, Waln set sail for China. Upon arrival she was taken

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John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters."
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Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels and three short story collections. Her 2004 novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her m
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Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

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Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and she has been a critically acclaimed international bestselling author ever since.

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Colson Whitehead

COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.

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John Fowles

John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles said "I have tried to escape ever since."

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Jennifer Coburn

Jennifer Coburn is the author of CRADLES OF THE REICH, a historical novel about three very different German women who meet at a Nazi Lebensborn breeding home.

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Neal Shusterman

Award-winning author Neal Shusterman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he began writing at an early age. After spending his junior and senior years of high school at the American School of Mexico City, Neal went on to UC Irvine, where he made his mark on the UCI swim team, and wrote a successful humor column. Within a year of graduating, he had his first book deal, and was hired to write a movie script.

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Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, OBE is ranked alongside Enid Blyton and Mark A. Cooper as "The most original and best spy-kids authors of the century." (New York Times). Anthony has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he is also the writer and creator of award winning detective series Foyle’s War, and more recently event drama Collision, among his other television works he has written episodes for Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. Anthony became patron to East Anglia Children’s Hospices in 2009.

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David Downing

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Josephine Tey

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S.G. MacLean

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Lucy Cruickshanks

New novel, THE LIBERATION'S CHILD.

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New novel, THE LIBERATION'S CHILD.

Lucy Cruickshanks’ novels have been shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize, named a Top Ten Book of the Year by The Bookbag, and featured widely in the press.

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Website at https://lucycruickshanks.co.uk
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