Our Authors

Prosper Merimée was born in France in 1803 to a wealthy family. At university, he studied law, Greek, Spanish, English and Russian and learnt these languages well enough to translate...

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest of thirteen children. Because his father travelled widely and his mother died when he was small, he was largely raised...

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, into a family of serious Christians and famous engineers. His grandfather built lighthouses and this became a...

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, in 1865 and spent the first five years of his life there. Although he travelled to England in 1871, his first...

Hector Hugh Monro, an upper-class Englishman, is better-known by his pen name, Saki. He was born in 1870 and, after living for many years with two aunts (that he hated)...

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in 1849 in Maine, a state in north-western America. Her love of the countryside grew as she had to take long walks as a child...

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer, who is still well-known today for mystery novels and short stories about the supernatural. He was the leading ghost-story writer of...

Sherwood Anderson wrote short stories in a very realistic tradition, often focussing on the poor and helpless. He was born in Ohio, USA, in 1876. His childhood was a very...

Stephen Crane was born in 1871 in the United States. He began writing at the age of only four and, by the time he was in his mid-teens, had already...

Thomas Hardy was born in the English countryside in 1840, the son of a builder. His family did not have enough money for him to attend university and so he...