Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady

Mallowan, DBE (ne Miller; 15 September 1890 12 January
1976) was an English crime novelist, short story
writer and playwright. She is best known for her 66 detective
novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those
revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule
Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-
running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap,[1] and
six romances under the name Mary Westmacott. In 1971 she
was elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British
Empire (DBE) for her contribution to literature.[2]
Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family
in Torquay, Devon. She served in a Devon hospital during
the First World War, tending to troops coming back from the
trenches, before marrying and starting a family in London. She
was initially an unsuccessful writer with six rejections,[3] but this
changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring
Hercule Poirot, was published in 1920.[4] During the Second World War she worked as a pharmacy assistant at
University College Hospital, London, during the Blitz and acquired a good knowledge of poisons which featured in
many of her novels.

Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (/dulz/[1] /vrn/;[1][2] French: [yl vn]; 8
February 1828 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet,
and playwright.
Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes,
where he 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. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules
Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a widely
popular series of scrupulously researched adventure novels
including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and Around the World
in Eighty Days (1873).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France
and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the
literary avant-garde and on surrealism.[3] His reputation is
markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often
been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely
because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which
his novels are often reprinted.[4]
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the
world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William
Shakespeare.[5] He has sometimes been called the "Father of
Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G.
Wells and Hugo Gernsback.[6]