Anniversaries, 29 March
Jo Nesbø
The Norwegian, Jo Nesbø, is one of Norway’s most appreciated and successful crime writers. He was born in Oslo as Jon Nesbø, but when he was 16 he formally changed his first name to Jo, which was what his parents had originally thought of calling him. Already when he was very small, the family moved to Molde where he grew up and attended school. His mother was a librarian and read a lot, his father was a company director who often liked to tell stories that he had made up himself for his three s...
Anniversaries, 29 March
Marcel Aymé
French author born in the town of Joigny, Burgundy, as the youngest of six children. His father was a cavalry farrier. His mother died when he was very young, so he was raised by his maternal grandparents who owned a brickworks at Villers-Robert, a small village in the Jura. After his grandparents died, he was looked after by an aunt who lived in the nearby town of Dole. These are the places in which many of Aymé’s novels are set. The family was radical and anti-clerical, a fact that plagued th...
Photo: Popperfoto via Getty Images (1960)
Sample of authors
MacLean, Alistair
The Scottish author Alistair Stuart MacLean was born in Shettleston, Glasgow, in a Gaelic-speaking family as Alasdair MacGill-Eain (his Gaelic name was anglicised by the British authorities). His father was a Church of Scotland minister. While the author was still a baby, the family moved to a farm near Daviot in the Highlands. After the death of his father, his mother returned to Glasgow with...