Bill Naughton was a British playwright and author best known for his plays "Spring and Port Wine" and "Alfie", the latter which he adapted for screen in the iconic 1966 film starring Michael Caine, and the 2004 remake with Jude Law.Born in Ireland in 1910, he grew up in Lancashire; his writing contains vivid evocations of the impoverished mining communities of the North of England, bound together by ties of family, kith and kin.Bill Naughton won the Screenwriters award 1967 and 1968 and the Prix Italia for Radio Play '1974' before settling in the Isle of Man where he wrote several children's books based on his childhood memories. Naughton died in 1992.Frederick William John Hemmings was… born in Southampton in 1920. Hemmings served in the Second Wrold War, decrypting German codes in the Army Intelligence Corps, but in 1946 he returned to academic life in Oxford, completing his DPhil in 1949, a groundbreaking study that was published the following year by Oxford University Press: The Russian Novel in France 1884-1914.Hemmings made his mark as a pioneer of Zola studies and is known as the foremost Zola critic in the English-speaking world. Further studies on Zola and Stendhal were published in later years, as were books on two other major 19th-century French writers: The King of Romance: A Portrait of Alexandre Dumas (1979) and Baudelaire the Damned(1982). This project of Balzacian and Zolaesque proportions was realized all the more remarkably during a busy nine-year term of office as head of the French department at Leicester University (1963-85), where he was a hugely respected literary scholar.Hemmings was twice married and left behind one son and one daughter when he died in Leicester in 1997.Liam O'Flaherty (aka Liam � Flaithearta) was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance, born August 28, 1896, died September 7, 1984. At the age of 12, he went to Rockwell College. This was followed by enrollments at Holy Cross and University College, Dublin. In 1923, O'Flaherty published his first novel, Thy Neighbour's Wife, thought to be one of his best. In 1935, his novel The Informer (for which he had been awarded the 1925 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction) was made into a film by John Ford.