Author Profiles
Profiles Index
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, and What is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney's independent publishing house and the 826 Valencia writing lab, which has since expanded to 826 National, writing workshops for teens around the U.S.
Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby is the author of the bestselling novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the editor of the short story collection Speaking with the Angel. In 1999, he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. He lives in North London.
Margaret Atwood
Known for sharp social commentary delivered via science fiction or speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood's books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.
Salman Rushdie
Born in Bombay in 1947, Salman Rushdie is the author of numerous novels, including 'Midnight's Children,' 'The Satanic Verses,' 'The Moor's Last Sigh,' and 'The Enchantress of Florence.' His numerous literary prizes include the Booker Prize for 'Midnight's Children' and the Whitbread Prize for 'The Satanic Verses.'
Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey has been long revered as a leading writer of nature and ecology who Frequently challenged the system that destroys the wild he thrusts himself and his readers into. Among his work is 'Desert Solitaire,' a memoir of the time Abbey spent as a park ranger and fire lookout at Arches national Monument, and 'The Monkey Wrench Gang,' Abbey's famous novel about a gang of rebellious eco-warriors.
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie, the son a Spokane Indian mother and a Coeur d’Alene Indian father, grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA. Alexie is known not only for his novels and short stories, which debunk the notion of the nobly suffering Indian, he is also a songwriter and film-maker, and the recipient of numerous literary awards and honors.
T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle is known for his humor and his biting satire. Over the course of his career as a novelist, he has shown a propensity for writing about famous and fascinating American eccentrics such as sexual-behavior scientist Alfred Kinsey in 'The Inner Circle' (2004), cereal inventor John Harvey Kellogg in 'The Road to Wellville,' and most recently, Frank Lloyd Wright in 'The Women.'
Cornelia Funke
Sometimes regarded as the German J.K. Rowling, Cornelia Funke is the author of numerous works of fiction. She is most widely known for her fantasy novels Drangonrider, The Thief Lord, and Inkheart, all of which have become international bestsellers.
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling (born Joanne Rowling on July 31, 1965) is the famous author of the Harry Potter series, which has sold hundreds of millions of copies around the world. She was estimated to be a billionare by Forbes magazine in 2004.
John Updike
John Updike wrote and published over 60 books, including novels and collections of short stories, poetry, and essays. Throughout his career, he won nearly every literary award available. [i]The Early Stories 1953-1975[/i], a large anthology of the author's short stories published in 2003, won him the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and in 2006 he was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story. John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009. He was 76
Joan Didion
Joan Didion, born in California in 1934 and a graduate from Berkeley in 1956, wrote her first novel in the early 1960's and has written four since then. Her most highly esteemed work - that which made her famous as a chronicler of American culture and politics - is her narrative nonfiction.
Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd is the author of three spiritual memoirs and the modern classic bestseller, 'The Secret Life of Bees,' the coming-of-age spiritual story of a fourteen-year-old girl in the South in 1964 and her black housekeeper.
Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Shadow Country and The Snow Leopard. His fiction includes At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for a National Book Award, Far Tortuga, and Shadow Country.
Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton is the author of best-selling novels like 'The Andromeda Strain' and 'Jurassic Park' as well as a writer, director, and producer of television and movies. He created, wrote, and directed the television blockbuster, 'ER.'
Paul Auster
American author Paul Auster was born and raised in Newark, NJ. He graduated from Columbia University in 1970 and moved to Paris, where he made his living translating the works of French authors. He returned to the states in 1974 to begin writing essays, poems, and novels of his own.
Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is the author of the best-selling cyberpunk novel 'Snow Crash,' 'The Diamond Age,' 'Cryptonomicon,' and most recently, 'Anathem.' Though Stephenson early on developed a following as a cyberpunk author, he has since gone on to flex his muscles in the realm of historical fiction in a 2700 page trilogy dubbed The Baroque Cycle.
Stephen King
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Junior (born November 11, 1922) is an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. His novels include Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus, and Timequake
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West--the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), and All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992.
Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy works, including many comic books. Known for his graphic novel collaborations with David McKean, his best known work is The Sandman. Neil Gaiman's recent works include Endless Nights, American Gods, and Coraline, a children's book also illustrated by David McKean, and Anansi Boys, a novel that shares a central character with American Gods.
John Irving
John Winslow Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. He is the author of nine novels, among them The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus, and The Fourth Hand. Mr. Irving is married and has three sons. He lives in Toronto and in southern Vermont.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, the essay collection How to Be Alone, and The Corrections, winner of the National Book Award. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. He lives in New York City.
Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore is the author of Practical Demonkeeping, Coyote Blue, Bloodsucking Fiends, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Lamb, and Fluke. His fiction is compelling and hilarious.
Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle, Irish novelist and screenwriter, is the author of The Commitments and the Booker Prize Winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Roddy Doyle is one of Ireland's funniest writers...
Max Barry
Max Barry is an Australian novelist based in Melbourne. In a previous life, he worked in sales at Hewlett-Packard. His first novel, Syrup (1999), though a cult hit went largely unnoticed. In 2003, he published Jennifer Government, a bestseller and a New York Times Notable book. Jennifer Government was a science fiction novel about multinational corporations and rampant consumerism. In 2005, Max Barry published Company, a novel satirizing corporate culture.