Anniversaries, 28 April
Beate Grimsrud
The Norwegian novelist, playwright and filmmaker Beate Grimsrud was born in Bærum, a suburb of Oslo, where she grew up with a twin brother and other siblings. Despite being diagnosed with dyslexia at an early age and a vision impairment, Beate knew since she was five years old that she wanted to be an author. Her parents and siblings read to her throughout her childhood and adolescence. She did not discover audio books until her twenties.
In 1984, she moved to south-central Stockholm in ...
Anniversaries, 28 April
Alistair MacLean
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 her four sons in 1937. MacLean attended Hillhead High School where he read English, history and...
Anniversaries, 28 April
Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee was an American author who grew up in the town of Monroeville, Alabama, as the youngest of four siblings. Her mother, Frances Finch, was a housewife and her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lawyer and former senator. Nelle Harper Lee attended Huntingdon College 1944–45 and read law at the University of Alabama 1945–49. She was also an exchange student in Oxford, England, for a year, but without graduating. She worked for an American airline in New York in the 1950s, but gave up...
Anniversaries, 28 April
Ian Rankin
The Scottish crime writer Ian James Rankin was born in the coal mining town of Cardenden, Fife, where his father owned a grocery store. His mother worked in a school canteen. There were few books at home, and Rankin began to visit his local library as a child and began to write short stories as a teenager. He attended Denend Primary School in Cardendan and later Auchterderran Junior High at Auchterderran followed by Beath High School in Cowdenbeath, graduating in 1978, the same year he...
Anniversaries, 28 April
Pierre Boileau
Pierre Boileau was one half of the partnership (and the brand) Boileau-Narcejac, which can best be described as French crime writing institution. The other half was Pierre Ayraud (writing under the pseudonym Thomas Narcejac). Both authors wrote detective novels both independently and together, many of which were made into popular films. They were also prominent figures on the French literary scene in the late 1900s and they wrote a number of often quoted reference works. Some claim that...
Anniversaries, 28 April
Lois Duncan
Lois Duncan Steinmetz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the daughter of Joseph Steinmetz and his wife Lois Duncan, both of them well-known photographers. The family moved to Sarasota, Florida, where Lois grew up and graduated from high school in 1952. By that time, she was already an established writer who published her work in magazines. She began to write when she was ten, and she sold her first story at thirteen.
Duncan enrolled at Duke University at Durham, North Carolina, but...
Photo: 1929 Bassano/Camera Press / TT
Sample of authors
Maugham, W. Somerset
William Somerset Maugham was a British author born in Paris. His father was a lawyer at the British Embassy there. When Maugham was eight years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, two years later his father died of cancer and the boy was sent to live with his uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable in Kent. Maugham suffered from a serious stammer, he was shy and avoided speaking in public; unlike his...