Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 - 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. Born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, Verne was trained to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage.

José Maria Sanchez-Silva y Garcia-Morales (1911 - 2002) was a Spanish writer. He received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1968 for his contribution to children's literature. Sanchez-Silva was born in Madrid. His father, José María Sánchez Silva, was a journalist close to anarchism, writing in the journal Earth, who went into exile in 1939. But many years before the family had been unstructured and son (Sánchez-Silva) just lived with his father at times was practically a vagrant child.

Herbert Reinecker (24 December 1914 - 27 January 2007) was a very prolific German novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. Born in Hagen, Westphalia, Reinecker began to write short stories already as a high school student. In 1936 he moved to Berlin, where he became editor-in-chief of a youth magazine, Jungvolk. In the same year he also co-authored a book, Jugend in Waffen (Armed Youth). This was a time when the Nazis had already been in power for three years and when the media had long been gleichgeschaltet.

ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON (1850 -1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie,and G. K.

Andrea Camilleri (born 6 September 1925 in Porto Empedocle) is an Italian writer. Originally from Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Camilleri began studies at the Faculty of Literature in 1944, without concluding them, meanwhile publishing poems and short stories. From 1948 to 1950 Camilleri studied stage and film direction at the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Arts (Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica) and began to take on work as a director and screenwriter, directing especially plays by Pirandello and Beckett.

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (13 February 1903 - 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 200 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret. In January 1919, the sixteen-year-old Simenon took a job at the Gazette de Liège, a newspaper edited by Joseph Demarteau.

Jeremy Taylor has written over 45 books for language learners and still loves writing. When he's not writing, he travels around Europe, taking photographs, training teachers, and getting ideas for new books. He loves cooking, growing his own food and picking (and cooking) wild mushrooms. For more information about Jeremy, have a look at his website: www.jeremytaylor.eu