Curated category
English male novelists
- Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
- J. R. R. TolkienJohn Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on the 3rd of January 1892 in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State. His father Arthur worked as a bank manager for the British…
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyOn a summer day in 1804, Percy Bysshe Shelley stood before the wooden paling fence at Eton College. He held a bag of gunpowder he had stolen from the school…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, British India. His parents were Alice Kipling and John Lockwood Kipling.
- Lewis CarrollCharles Lutwidge Dodgson entered the world on the 27th of January 1832 at All Saints' Vicarage in Daresbury, Cheshire. He was the oldest boy and third of…
- Thomas HardyThomas Hardy was born on the 2nd of June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, a small hamlet east of Dorchester. His father worked as a stonemason and local builder…
- Jonathan SwiftJonathan Swift entered the world on the 30th of November 1667 in Dublin. His father was a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire who had fled to Ireland after his…
- William MorrisWilliam Morris was born at Elm House in Walthamstow, Essex, on the 24th of March 1834. He entered a world of wealth and evangelical Protestantism as the…
- A. A. MilneAlan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London on the 18th of January 1882. He grew up at Henley House School where his father taught him to read by the…
- Benjamin DisraeliBenjamin D'Israeli was born on the 21st of December 1804 at 6 King's Road, Bedford Row, Bloomsbury. His family carried a Sephardic Jewish mercantile…
- James Wood (critic)James Douglas Graham Wood was born on the 1st of November 1965 in Durham, England. His father Dennis William Wood worked as a minister and professor of…
- Graeme Davis (game designer)Graeme Davis began his professional life in banking before switching paths to study archaeology at the University of Durham.
- Aldous HuxleyThe year 1894 marked the birth of Aldous Leonard Huxley in Godalming, Surrey. He entered a world already defined by scientific brilliance and literary fame.
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe was born in Fore Street, London, during the summer or early autumn of 1660. His family name was originally Foe, and he later added the…
- Thomas MoreThomas More entered the world on the 7th of February 1478 within the City of London. His father Sir John More was a successful lawyer who later became a…
- Samuel Butler (novelist)Samuel Butler was born on the 4th of December 1835 at the rectory in Langar, Nottinghamshire. His father Rev Thomas Butler had been a son of Dr Samuel Butler…
- Cavan ScottCavan Scott was born on the 18th of April 1973. He began his career writing about rural life rather than space operas or time travel.
- Philip SidneyPenshurst Place in Kent served as the birthplace of Sir Philip Sidney on the 30th of November 1554. He emerged from a family deeply embedded in English…
- Michael MoorcockMichael John Moorcock arrived in Mitcham, Surrey on the 18th of December 1939. The landscape of London would later shape his fiction, particularly areas like…
- Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin was offered the post of Poet Laureate in 1984, and he turned it down. The death of Sir John Betjeman had opened the role, the highest poetic…
- Kevin Crossley-HollandKevin John William Crossley-Holland arrived in the world on the 7th of February 1941. He grew up in Whiteleaf, a quiet village nestled within the Chilterns…
- Richard AldingtonEdward Godfree Aldington arrived in the world on the 8th of July 1892 within the port city of Portsmouth. He was the eldest of four children born to Albert…
- Colin WilsonColin Henry Wilson was born on the 26th of June 1931 in Leicester. His father worked in a shoe factory while his mother managed their household.
- Thomas NasheThomas Nashe entered the world on the 30th of November 1567 in Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk. His father William served as curate there before the…