Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French author best known for his tales of adventure, includingnbsp;Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea,nbsp;Journey to the Center of the Earth, andnbsp;Around the World in Eighty Days. A true visionary, Verne foresaw the skyscraper, the submarine, and the airplane, among many other inventions, and is now regarded as one of the fathers of science fiction.nbsp;
Frank Wynne is a writer and award-winning literary translator. Born in Ireland he has lived and worked in Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires and currently lives in San Jos�, Costa Rica. He has translated more than a dozen major novels, among them the works of Michel Houellebecq, Fr�d�ric Beigbeder, Pierre M�rot and the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma. A journalist and broadcaster, he has written for the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Irish Times, Melody Maker, and Time Out.
Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles, California on September 26, 1949. She received a B. A. at Vassar College in 1971 and an M. F. A. and a Ph.D from the University of Iowa. From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. Her first critically acclaimed novel, The Greenlanders (1988), was preceded by three other novels and a highly regarded short story collection, The Age of Grief (1987). In 1985, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story Lily, which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her novel A Thousand Acres (1991) received both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her other works include Moo;… Horse Heaven; and Ordinary Love and Good Will. In 2014 her title, Some Luck, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
Jules Gabriel Verne(18281905) was a French author and a pioneer of the science fiction genre. Frank Wynnewas awarded the IMPAC Prize for his translation of Michel Houellebecqs The Elementary Particles. Jane Smileyis the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acresand more than ten other novels. P. W. Cogmanhas taught French at the University of Southampton and is the author of Narration in Nineteenth-Century French Short Fiction.