James B. Patterson (born March 22, 1947) is an American author of thriller novels, largely known for his series about American psychologist Alex Cross. Patterson also wrote the Michael Bennett, Women's Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, and Witch & Wizard series, as well as many stand-alone thrillers, nonfiction and romance novels.

After Patterson retired from advertising in 1985, he devoted his time to writing. The novels featuring his character Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist formerly of the Washington D.C. Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation who now works as a private psychologist and government consultant, are his most popular and the top-selling U.S. detective series in the past ten years. Patterson has written 71 novels in 33 years. He has had 19 consecutive #1 New York Times bestselling novels, and holds The New York Times record for most bestselling hardcover fiction titles by a single author, a total of 63, which is also a Guinness World Record. As the world's best-selling author, his novels account for one in 17 of all hardcover novels sold in the United States; in recent years his novels have sold more copies than those of Stephen King, John Grisham and Dan Brown combined.

James Herriot was the pen name of James Alfred Wight, OBE, FRCVS also known as Alf Wight (3 October 1916 – 23 February 1995), an English veterinary surgeon and writer, who used his many years of experiences as a veterinarian to write a series of books of stories about animals and their owners. He is best known for these semi-autobiographical works, which are often referred to collectively as All Creatures Great and Small, a title used in some editions and in film and television adaptations.

James Alfred Wight was born on 3 October 1916, in Sunderland, County Durham, England to James (1890–1960) and Hannah Bell (1890–1980) Wight. Shortly after their wedding, the Wights moved from Brandling Street, Sunderland to Glasgow in Scotland, where James took work as both a ship plater and pianist for a local cinema, while Hannah was a singer as well as a dressmaker.

Jack Kornfield (born 1945) is a teacher in the vipassana movement of American Theravada Buddhism. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, including as a student of the Thai monk Ajahn Chah. He has taught meditation worldwide since around 1974.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1967, Kornfield joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to the Public Health Service in northeast Thailand, where there are several Buddhist forest monasteries. Here he met Ajahn Chah, who became his teacher. Upon returning to the United States in 1972, Kornfield co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein.

Jack Campbell (fl. c. 2000), pseudonym for American science fiction author John G. Hemry

John G. Hemry (LCDR, USN ret.) is an American author of military science fiction novels. Drawing on his experience as a retired United States Navy officer, he has written the Stark's War and Paul Sinclair series. Under the name Jack Campbell, he has written six volumes of the Lost Fleet series. He has also written over a dozen short stories, many published in Analog magazine, and a number of non-fiction works.

Hemry has continued the Lost Fleet series with a spin-off: Beyond the Frontier, focusing on the main characters from the Lost Fleet. He has plans to begin a second called Phoenix Rising, focusing on the collapse of the Syndicate Worlds.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.

Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

Joanne "Jo" Rowling, (born 31 July 1965), better known as J. K. Rowling, is a British author best known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies and been the basis for a popular series of films, in which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts as well as maintaining creative control by serving as a producer on the final instalment.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2011, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be US$1 billion.

Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer. Fleming is best known for creating the fictional spy James Bond and the series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character. Fleming was from a wealthy family, connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. and his father was MP for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through a number of jobs before he started writing.

The Bond books are amongst the biggest-selling series of fictional books of all-time, having sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Fleming also wrote the children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two works of non-fiction.

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene was notable for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.

George R. R. Martin (born September 20, 1948), sometimes referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for his A Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels, which HBO adapted into the dramatic series Game of Thrones. Martin was selected by Time magazine as one of the "2011 Time 100," a list of the "most influential people in the world."

George R. R. Martin was born on September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey the son of a longshoreman, whose working class family lived in a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks. He attended, but did not enjoy his time at Marist High School, though he would later acknowledge that it was during those critical years that he developed his lifelong interest in the superhero genre, notably the Marvel Comics titles.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, including six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature.

Drew Karpyshyn (born July 28, 1971) is a Canadian video game scenario writer, scriptwriter and novelist.

Karpyshyn was a loan officer, but when he got in a car accident, he quit his job as a loan officer and was able to go to college again to gain a degree in English. He got his start as a game designer for Wizards of the Coast, and he also has written two novels for Wizards of the Coast in 2001. His first novel is Temple Hill, set in the Forgotten Realms setting.

He later joined video game company BioWare. He wrote the scenario and much of the dialogue for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and was one of the lead writers and planners on Jade Empire, as well as working on several games in the Baldur's Gate series. 

Dorothy Leigh Sayers, although Sayers herself preferred and encouraged the use of her middle initial to facilitate this pronunciation; Oxford, 13 June 1893 – Witham, 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divina Commedia to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays.

Dorothy Gilman born June 25, 1923 (also known as Dorothy Gilman Butters) is a United States author of mystery and spy fiction. She is most well known for the Mrs. Pollifax series of spy novels, about spy and grandmother Emily Pollifax, who chooses to become a spy in her 60s, and who stars in fourteen books written over three decades.

Gilman's books tend to feature uncommon, unique characters, often travelling to exotic locales.

Dorothy Gilman was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to minister James Bruce and Essa (Starkweather) Gilman.

David Morrell (born April 24, 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario) is a Canadian-American novelist, best known for his debut 1972 novel First Blood, which would later become the successful Rambo film franchise starring Sylvester Stallone. He has written 28 novels, and his work has been translated into 26 languages. He has also written the 2007-2008 Captain America comic book miniseries The Chosen.

Morrell decided to become a writer at the age of 17, after being inspired by the writing in the classic television series Route 66. In 1966, Morrell received his B.A. in English from St. Jerome's University and moved to the United States to study with Hemingway scholar Philip Young at Pennsylvania State University, where he would eventually receive his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. During his time at Penn State he also met science fiction writer Philip Klass, better known by the pseudonym William Tenn, who taught the basics of writing fiction.

David Hewson (born 9 January 1953) is a contemporary British author of crime and mystery novels. His series of modern crime stories featuring police officers in Rome, led by the young detective Nic Costa, began with A Season for the Dead, and has now been contracted to run to at least nine instalments by British, American, European and Asian publishers. The author's debut novel, Shanghai Thunder, was published by Robert Hale, in the United Kingdom, in 1986. Most copies of the book were sent to libraries, and it is not recognized in subsequent publications. His second book, Semana Santa, set in Spain during Holy Week, was made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino, and won the W H Smith Fresh Talent prize for one of the best first novels of 1996. He has also written a number of standalone novels, including Lucifer's Shadow and The Promised Land and wrote the second chapter of the audio serial novel The Chopin Manuscript started by Jeffery Deaver, with Lee Child and 13 other co-writers, for the audiobook site Audible.com. In June 2011 it was announced Hewson will write the novels based upon the first two series of the Danish TV series The Killing.