Archives: Authors

Neil Johnson is a copywriter and Creative Director of an international advertising firm in Singapore. He led a travelling life thanks to his Dad’s naval career, and grew up in India and Europe. Neil is married with two grown up children and Singapore has been home since 1993. While growing up, his children – like all children – asked umpteen questions. The answers to those questions have become the stories he writes.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817). Rightfully having earned the place of one of the most widely read authors in English Literature, her works of romantic fiction are well known for her social commentary of the happenings of the 18th century.
Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, was born in Hampshire in 1775, and later lived in Bath and the village of Chawton. As a child and teenager, she wrote brilliantly witty stories for her family’s amusement, as well as a novella, Lady Susan. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in 1811 and was soon followed by Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. Austen died in 1817, and Persuasion and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously in 1818.

Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 in Pennsylvania. Her father was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Alcott started selling stories in order to help provide financial support for her family. Her first book was Flower Fables (1854). She worked as a nurse during the American Civil War and in 1863 she published Hospital Sketches, which was based on her experiences. Little Women was published in 1868 and was based on her life growing up with her three sisters. She followed it with three sequels, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886) and she also wrote other books for both children and adults. Louisa May Alcott was an abolitionist and a campaigner for women’s rights. She died on 6 March 1888.

Victor Hugo (1802-85). Poet, playwright and novelist, and one of the most prolific, versatile and acclaimed of the French Romantics. Hugo is chiefly remembered for his great novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of pioneering thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, eloped with the poet Percy Shelley at the age of sixteen. Three years later, during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, Shelley famously wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. The years of her marriage were blighted by the deaths of three of her four children, and further tragedy followed in 1822, when Percy Shelley drowned in Italy. Following his death, Mary Shelley returned to England and continued to travel and write until her own death at the age of fifty-three.

Emily Brontë (1818-48). Best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, and a collection of surviving poems, she remains one of the most intensely original and passionate voices in English literature. Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1818 and moved to Haworth when her father was made perpetual curate there. The following year her mother, Maria Branwell, died, leaving five daughters and a son who were looked after by their mother’s sister Elizabeth.
Emily’s two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in childhood, following a stay at Cowan Bridge School, the model for Lowood in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. To amuse themselves the Brontë children created fantasy worlds based on reading from a wide range of sources. Emily and Anne created Gondal, an imaginary kingdom for which they wrote annals and journals, which unfortunately have not survived. Emily briefly attended the school at Cowan Bridge, but was wretched and homesick for Haworth and the Yorkshire moors, and returned home after only three months. She became a governess in Halifax but planned with Charlotte to set up a school at Haworth, and together they went to the Pensionnate Heger in Brussels to increase their qualifications. Emily returned home on the death of her aunt in 1842 and remained there for the rest of her life.
Her poems were discovered by Charlotte in 1846 and published in a joint volume entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It included the pieces on which her reputation as a fine poet now rests: ‘To Imagination’, ‘Plead for Me’ and ‘Last Lines’. Emily Brontë died from tuberculosis in 1848, only a few months after the death of her brother, Branwell.

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of England’s most famous writers and social commentators. He is the author of the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is also well known for his essays and journalism, particularly his works covering his travels and his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His writing is celebrated for its piercing clarity, purpose and wit and his books continue to be bestsellers all over the world.

Criselda Yabes has published eight books, including Sarena’s Story: The Loss of a Kingdom, which also won
the UP Centennial Literary Prize for Creative Non-Fiction simultaneously with Below the Crying Mountain.
A journalism graduate of the University of the Philippines in Diliman, she worked as correspondent for the
international press in Manila, covering politics and coups as well as other major events overseas.