Tom Sharpe, who has died aged 85, did not start writing comic novels until 1971 when he was 43, but once he got going he gained a large readership. Wilt in Nowhere is the fourth in the series of novels about hapless polytechnic lecturer Henry Wilt, his wife Eva, and their incorrigible four little girls, now aged 14, at convent school and bubbling over with an unhealthy interest in all things se... Read More
Tom Sharpe was an English bestselling novelist whose savagely satirical black comedies attacked the injustice of apartheid and the absurdities of academic life. Sharpe was educated at Bloxham School. He then was accepted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history and social anthropology. In 1951, Tom Sharpe moved to South Africa, where he worked as a social worker and a teacher, befo... Read More
Best known for her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing's life work spans more than a half century. She was born in Persia to British parents in 1919. Her family then moved to Southern Africa, where she spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. When her second marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, where her first novel, The Grass is Singing, wa... Read More
Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns, from the politics of race - which she confronted in her early novels set in Africa... Read More
Doris May Lessing was a British writer, author of novels including The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the oldest person e... Read More
Doris Lessing, in full Doris May Lessing, was a British writer whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people involved in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a l... Read More
“The impact of Doris Lessing is still profound”, says Gaby Wood. And indeed, throughout her impressive and long career, Lessing earned the W.H. Gibson Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the David Cohen Prize, the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award, among others. In 2007 she became the eleventh woman and the oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. She declined damehood in 199... Read More
British writer Doris Lessing felt that “a writer’s job is to provoke questions.” Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing, is about a white farmer and his wife and their African servant in Rhodesia. Among her most substantial works is the series Children of Violence, a five-novel sequence that centres on Martha Quest, who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. The Golden Note... Read More
An English art historian, novelist and journalist Iain George Pears was born on 8 August 1955 in Coventry, England. He was educated at Warwick School, an all-boys public school in Warwick, and studied at Wadham College, Oxford. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for the BBC, Channel 4 and ZDF in Germany. Pears first came to international prominence with his best selling book An Instance of... Read More
Jostein Gaarder is a Norwegian school teacher and author of books that examined the history of philosophy and religion for an audience of young readers. Gaarder studied the history of ideas, religion, and Nordic literature at the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1976, he worked as a secondary-school teacher of philosophy, religion, and literature in Oslo and Bergen. He began his literary... Read More
Joseph Delaney is a retired English teacher living in Lancashire. Delaney became an English teacher at the Blackpool Sixth Form College, where he helped start the Media and Film Studies Department. His first works were written under the pseudonym J. K. Haderack. Beginning with the publication of the first book of The Wardstone Chronicles in 2004, published under his real name, Delaney achieved... Read More
Joseph Henry Delaney is a British author of fantasy books and the all-time bestseller The Wardstone Chronicles. He first got the idea for the Wardstone Chronicles series when he moved to the village where he lives now and discovered there was a local boggart - ‘a man like me needs boggarts around’. He made a note in his notebook ‘a story about a man who hunts boggarts’ and years later when he h... Read More
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones, and a sequence of novels and films beginning with the life of a thirtysomething singleton in London trying to make sense of life and love. She was part of the screenwriting team on the associated movies. Bridget Jones begins the year with a set of resolutions dedicated to... Read More
Helen Fielding is an English novelist and screenwriter. She worked for many years in London as a newspaper and TV journalist, travelling as wildly and as often as possible to Africa, India and Central America. She is the author of four novels: Cause Celeb, Bridget Jones’ s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, and co-wrote the screenplays for... Read More
Helen Fielding is the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries. She also won British Book of the Year award for Bridget Jones’s Diary. She received her early education from Wakefield Girls High School and then she went on to major in English from St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Moreover, she performed... Read More
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born American writer of novels, short stories, and essays in Yiddish. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw and one in Fiction for his collection A Cr... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. William Cook in the New Statesman considered James Bond to be "the culmination of an important but much-maligned tradition in English literature. As a boy, Fleming devoured the Bulldog Drummond tales of Lieutenant Colonel H. C. McNeile and the Richard... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. In 1914 Fleming attended Durnford School, a preparatory school on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. He did not enjoy his time at Durnford; he suffered unpalatable food, physical hardship and bullying. In May 1939 Fleming was recruited by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intellig... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. He was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. His mother was Evelyn, and his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming is a novel centred around the infamous British MI5 spy, James Bond... Read More
Moonraker is the third novel by Ian Fleming to feature his fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. According to the author Raymond Benson, Moonraker is a deeper and more introspective book than Fleming's previous work, which allows the author to develop the characters further. In Moonraker, Millionaire Hugo Drax cheats at cards, the highest offence in polite English society. Special... Read More