Jasper Fforde
Three separate interviews in which Jasper Fforde discusses the Thursday Next series, his Nursery Crime novels and Shades of Grey, the first in a trilogy set in a future world recognizable as our own - but only just.
Abraham Verghese
An interview with Abraham Verghese about his life and writing and in particular about his extraordinary 2009 novel Cutting for Stone, set in 1960s and '70s Ethiopia and 1980s New York.
Martha A Sandweiss
An interview with Martha Sandweiss in which she discusses her book Passing Strange, a biography of Clarence King who lived a double lifeas the celebrated white explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter named James Todd, married to Ada with whom he had five children.
Amy Greene
Amy Greene talks about her first novel, Bloodroot, which brings her native Appalachiaand the faith and fury of its peopleto rich and vivid life.
Official Biography (published on the book jacket) Lian Hearn is a pseudonym. The author was born in England, has
studied Japanese and has a lifelong interest in Japan.
BookBrowse Notes Lian Hearn is a pseudonym for Gillian Rubinstein, a well-known Australian
writer of children's books and plays. She chose not to publish The
Otori Trilogy under her own name so as to have her first adult book judged
in it's own right and not compared to her previous writing for children.
She chose her name by combining her childhood nickname (the last letters of
Gillian) and the surname of Lafcadio Hearn, an Irish writer who lived in Japan
at the end of the 19th century.
In June 2002, sometime after the book had been sold on its own merits to publishers in multiple countries, and optioned for film writes, Rubinstein admitted that she was the author, saying "I think there is a strong tendency among the spectators
or the readers of culture to pigeonhole people, and that's the thing that
artists hate having done to them. They want to be free to do whatever seems to
be the right thing at the time."
Rubinstein has had a long-standing interest in Asia and returned to Japan in
1999 on a residency to work on what would become The Otori Trilogy.
Series Order
1. Across The Nightingale Floor
2. Grass For His Pillow
3. Brilliance of The Moon
4. The Harsh Cry of the Heron
5. Heaven's Net Is Wide - a prequel to the Otori series (2007).
This biography was last updated on 09/09/2006.
A note about the biographies
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