Author Bios

Gordon Rupert Dickson was born on November 1, 1923, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and moved with his family to Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a child following his father’s early death. He served in the United States Army during World War II and afterward enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where he studied creative writing under Robert…

Amor Towles was born in 1964 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in the Boston area before attending Yale University for his undergraduate education. He then earned a master’s degree in English from Stanford University, where he developed the deep engagement with literary tradition—particularly the great novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that would…

Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno was born on May 16, 1917, in Sayula, in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. His childhood was marked by violence and loss: his father was murdered in the aftermath of the Cristero War — the bloody conflict between the Mexican government and Catholic insurgents that tore apart the…

James Mallahan Cain was born on July 1, 1892, in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a college president and an opera singer — a background that gave him both intellectual rigor and a feel for the dramatic. He attended Washington College in Maryland, where his father was president, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1910 and…

Ernest Cline was born in 1972 in Ashland, Ohio, and grew up in the 1980s in a household shaped by video games, science fiction movies, and the emergent culture of home computing. He attended Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, before dropping out to pursue creative work, spending years writing screenplays and performing spoken-word poetry before…

Andy Weir was born in 1972 in Davis, California, and grew up in a household where science was a daily language — his father was a particle physicist. He studied computer science at UC San Diego before dropping out and pursuing a career as a software engineer, working for companies including Sandia National Laboratories and…

Blake Crouch was born in 1978 in Statesville, North Carolina, and studied English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his career writing crime thrillers set in the American West — the Wayward Pines trilogy, which he published independently before finding a major publisher, demonstrated his ability to…

Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, and grew up during the Depression-era Midwest in a household where books, carnival magic, and radio serials fed an imagination of extraordinary intensity. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934 and never earned a college degree, educating himself instead at the…

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Wales and Scotland following her family’s moves—an itinerant early life that gave her an outsider’s sensitivity to place and belonging that marks much of her fiction. She studied English at Girton College, Cambridge, and then worked as a journalist and deputy…

Maggie O’Farrell was born in 1972 in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and spent her childhood moving between Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Her early years were marked by a near-fatal illness at age eight — a viral encephalitis that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk, and which she has described as a formative encounter…