A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003, writer; born 24 Aug. 1936; Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other. Married 1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased) 2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters. Education Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford. Academic Honours: Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004 Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999 Prizes The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995; Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002; Publications: The Shadow of the Sun, 1964; Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994); The Game, 1967; Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989); Iris Murdoch 1976 The Virgin in the Garden, 1978; GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, 1979 (editor); Still Life, 1985 Sugar and Other Stories, 1987; George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor) Possession: a romance, 1990 Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor); Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991; Angels and Insects (novellas),1992 The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993; The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994 Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor); New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor); Babel Tower, 1996; New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor); The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor); Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998; The Biographer''s Tale, 2000; On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000; Portraits in Fiction, 2001; The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt); A Whistling Woman, 2002 Little

Connie Rose Porter is an American author best known for her books for children and young adults. She was the third youngest of nine children of a family living in a housing project. She has since taught English and creative writing at Milton Academy, Emerson College, and Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and was a regional winner in Granta's Best Young American Novelist contest.

Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Williams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody. Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrayed contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay\_Weldon

Rosellen Brown (born May 12, 1939) is an American author, and has been an instructor of English and creative writing at several universities, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Houston. She has won several grants and awards for her work. The 1996 film Before and After was adapted from her novel of the same name. (from Wikipedia)

Linda Gray Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1953. As the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Anne Sexton, she grew up in a home filled with books and words and an attention to language, and at an early age she, too, began to write. Afternoons were sometimes spent together with her mother, reading aloud from Anne’s favorite poems. By the time Linda was an adolescent, she had begun to write poetry and short fiction seriously, and spent many special hours curled up on the sofa in Anne’s study, discussing her own fledgling work as well as her mother’s growing oeuvre. Gradually, Anne began to rely on her daughter’s opinions, and dubbed Linda, “my greatest critic.” Linda graduated from Harvard in 1975 with a degree in literature, and then continued to live in the Boston area. After the death of her mother, Linda became the literary executor of the estate at twenty-one years old and edited several posthumous books of her mother’s poetry, as well as publishing "Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters." Concentrating at last fully on fiction, she published her first novel, "Rituals," in 1981; "Mirror Images," "Points of Light" and "Private Acts" followed over a ten year period. Points of Light was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame Special for CBS television and was translated into thirteen languages. Linda married in 1979, and converted to Judaism before her wedding. She and her husband moved to Manhattan in 1982, when he graduated from the Harvard Business School. In New York she made a very brief foray into the world of writing soap opera, though throughout she stayed devoted to her love of fiction. But her most important work was raising her two sons, who were born in 1983 and 1984. Linda left her lifelong home of the east coast in the spring of 1989, and moved her family to Northern California, just in time for the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake. There, while working in a soup kitchen, becoming Bat Mitzvah, and running a Meals on Wheels program for her temple, she finished her first memoir, "Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother," Anne Sexton," which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was optioned by Miramax Films. Having tea with film director Martin Scorsese in his home and discussing his interest in her book was a high point of Linda’s career as a writer. "Searching for Mercy Street" was reissued by Counterpoint Press in April 2011. On the West Coast, with a big enough backyard at last, Linda added three Dalmatians to her family—the type of pet she had when she was a child. She developed a passion for showing them in both the breed and obedience rings, and she bred and then whelped four litters of puppies on her own and began to consider herself a "breeder." She and her new husband, Brad Clink, are avid sailors on the San Francisco Bay and own a sloop named Mercy Street. Sexton's second memoir, "Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide," is about her struggle with her own mental illness and the legacy of suicide left to her by her mother and her mother’s family. Through the help of family, therapy and medicine, Linda confronted deep-seated issues, outlived her mother and curbed the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit. She has finished a new memoir now, one that details her childhood family's life, as well as her own adulthood, as reflected through their relationship with Dalmatians over the years. BESPOTTED: MY FAMILY'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THIRTY-EIGHT DALMATIANS will be published On September 7, 2014 by Counterpoint Press. She is now at work on a new novel and lives with her Dalmatians Breeze, Cody and Mac in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Mac is the cover model for the photo on the jacket cover of BESPOTTED. Visit Linda on her website at lindagraysexton.com

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth ­ in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM. Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Alice Adams was an American novelist, short story writer, academic and university professor. She was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia and attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946. She married, and had a child, but her marriage broke up, and she spent several years as a single mother, working as a secretary. Her psychiatrist told her to give up writing and get remarried; instead she published her first novel, Careless Love (1966), and a few years later she published her first short story in The New Yorker. She wrote many novels but she's best known for her short stories, in collections such as After You've Gone (1989) and The Last Lovely City (1999). She won numerous awards including the O. Henry Award, and Best American Short Stories Award.

Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.