Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman was born in Portchester, England on November 10, 1960. Gaiman worked as a journalist and freelance writer for a time, before deciding to try his hand at comic books. Some of his work has appeared in publications such as Time Out, The Sunday Times, Punch and The Observer. His first comic endeavor was the graphic novel series The Sandman. It is the comic book he is most famous for and the series has won every major industry award, including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, three Harvey Awards, and the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to win a literary award. Gaiman writes both children and adult books. His most… recent adult title, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, has won numerous awards, most notably: the British National Book Awards, Book of the Year for 2013, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel for 2014 . His other adult books include: Stardust, which won the Mythopoeic Award as best novel for adults in 1999; American Gods, which won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX, and Locus awards; and Anansi Boys. His children's books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish; Coraline, which won the Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla, the BSFA, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards; The Wolves in the Walls; and The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbery Award in 2009. He also co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett. In 2015, his title Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances made The New York Times Best Seller List.Shirley Jackson was born in San Francisco, California on December, 14, 1919. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1940. Much of her writing was done during the years she was raising her children. She is best-known for the short story The Lottery, which was first published in 1948 and adapted for television in 1952 and into play form in 1953. Her published works include articles, nonfiction prose, plays, poetry, seven novels, and fifty-five short stories. Her other works include Life among the Savages, Raising Demons, The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted to film, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. She died on August 8, 1965 at the age of 45.
Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in Upstate, New York. She attended Syracuse University and graduated as Valedictorian. She then attended University of Wisconsin where she earned an M. A. By the time she was 47 years old, she had published at least that many separate books, including 16 full-length novels and more than a dozen collections of short stories. Some of her works were done under the pseudonym Rosamund Smith. She has also written numerous poems collected in several volumes, at least three plays, many critical essays, and articles and reviews on various subjects while fulfilling her obligations as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, where with her husband Raymond… Smith she edited the Ontario Review, which the couple has continued since moving to Princeton in 1978. She has earned a reputation as indubitably one of our most prolific writers and very likely one of our best. Her fiction alone demonstrates considerable variety, ranging from direct naturalism to complex experiments in form. However, what chiefly makes her work her own is a quality of psychological realism, an uncanny ability to bring to the surface an underlying sense of foreboding or a threat of violence that seems to lurk just around the corner from the everyday domestic lives she depicts so realistically. Her first six novels, including Them (1969), which won the National Book Award, express these qualities in varying ways. she is also the recipient of an NEA grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Lifetime Achievement Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. Her title Give Me Your Heart made the New York Times Best seller list for 2011.