Anniversaries, 1 April
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol is one of the great Russian authors of the 19th century. He was born in the village of Sorochyntsi , Poltava province, Russian Empire (Ukraine), to a family of landowners. After finishing his education in Poltava and Nezhin with mediocre results he moved to St. Petersburg in the hope of becoming a poet or actor. He brought with him a collection of poems he had written while he was still at school, and he now paid to have them published under a pen name. It was a major...
Anniversaries, 1 April
Edgar Wallace
During his most productive period, the English author Edgar Wallace was one of the most popular authors in Europe. Allegedly, every fourth book sold in Britain was written by him. This is debatable, but his output was still vast and his books were printed in unusually large editions. He was also a playwright with some success both at home and on Broadway. Many of his stories were adapted for the screen and he was a screenwriter in Hollywood for a while, among other things as part of the team...
Anniversaries, 1 April
Anne McCaffrey
The American author Anne McCaffrey has gained great international popularity with stories that are a wilful mixture of SF (science fiction) and fantasy. That applies primarily to the books about the planet Pern, situated in another solar system. The stories in these include space ships, advanced technology and journeys between different planets, and the author herself called them SF. But they also describe beings, knowledge and abilities that belong to fantasy literature – not least dragons.
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Photo: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images (2019)
Sample of authors
Jónasson, Ragnar
The Icelandic author Ragnar Jónasson was born in Reykjavik. He grew up in a writing family where several family members are authors. As a teenager, he started to read crime fiction and translated a long row of Agatha Christie’s books into Icelandic, one a year for 14 years starting when he was seventeen. Ragnar Jónasson studied Law and while studying he worked as a journalist for radio and TV on I...