Eric Clifford Ambler was a British author and playwright born in London. His parents were music hall artists, and at the end of the 1920s he joined them on tour. He attended Colfe's Grammar School and studied engineering at University of London between 1925 and 1928. He entered the advertising business in the 1930s, in 1937 he became head of a London advertising agency and a year later he began...

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Luigi Pirandello was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century and a central figure in Italian letters between the First and Second World War. He was born in Chaos (or Kaos), a district near Agrigento in Sicily, a setting he often used in his work.
Pirandello grew up in comfortable circumstances in an upper middle-class family as the second of Stefano Pirandello's and his wife...

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Author and political philosopher born in Geneva, Switzerland as the son of a watchmaker. His mother died giving birth to him, and when he was ten, his father left him. In 1728, after a period as an artisan's apprentice, he started to travel round Switzerland and France trying his hand at various professions. Also in 1728, he met Madame de Warens (1700–1762), and she became his teacher and m...

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Swedish crime writer and former tax lawyer born in Uppsala. Both parents grew up near the city of Kiruna in the north of Sweden – Åsa Larsson’s grandfather is the Olympic gold-winning skier Erik "Kiruna-Lasse" Larsson – and she moved there with her family when she was four years old. She grew up in Kiruna and spent her summer holidays with her grandmother in the village of Kurkkio in Pajala. When...

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Peter Abrahams is an American author born in Boston, Massachusetts, where he also grew up. Summer holidays were spent in his parent’s cabin in Quebec, Canada. He earned his BA at Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1968; between 1968 and 1970 he was a harpoon fisherman in the Bahamas. He then worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBS) in Ottawa as a producer, among o...

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The British poet and novelist Sophie Hannah was born and raised in Manchester. She grew up with her younger sister in a house with many books – both their parents were authors. Their mother, Adèle Geras, born in Jerusalem, was an actor and singer before becoming a popular author of primarily children’s and young adult books. The father, Norman Geras, was born in Rhodesia. He is a retired prof...

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