The Best Authors

Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, and producer. She is known for writing the thriller and mystery novels, Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl (2012), which are all critically acclaimed. Her books have been published in 40 languages and according to The Washington Post, as of 2016 Gone Girl alone has sold more than 15 million copies.

Augusten Xon Burroughs (born Christopher Richter Robison, October 23, 1965) is an American writer best known for his New York Times bestselling memoir Running with Scissors (2002).

Christopher Richter Robison was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the younger of two sons of poet Margaret Robison and John G. Robison, former head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He is eight years younger than his brother, fellow memoirist John Elder Robison. He was raised in various towns in Massachusetts, including Shutesbury, Amherst, and Northampton. His older brother had already escaped the unstable home before their parents divorced on July 29, 1978. His mother then sent the 12-year-old Christopher to live with the family of her psychiatrist, Dr. Rodolph Harvey Turcotte, whose ever-changing collection of children, adopted children and patients lived in a large ramshackle property in Northampton.

John Winslow Irving is an American-Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American writer. Picoult has published 28 novels, as well as short stories, and has also written several issues of Wonder Woman. Approximately 40 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003.

Suzanne Collins is an American author and television writer. She is best known as the author of the young adult dystopian book series The Hunger Games.

Christopher Moore (born January 1, 1957) is an American writer of comic fantasy. He was born in Toledo, Ohio. He grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University and Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California.

An only child, Moore learned to amuse himself with his imagination. He loved reading and his father brought him plenty of books from the library every week. He started writing around the age of twelve and realized that this was his talent by the time he was 16, and he began to consider making it his career.

Moore's novels typically involve conflicted everyman characters struggling through supernatural or extraordinary circumstances. With the possible exceptions of Fool, The Serpent of Venice, Sacré Bleu, and Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel, all his books take place in the same universe and some characters recur from novel to novel.

Rebecca Wells (born February 3, 1953) is an American author, actor, and playwright known for the Ya-Ya Sisterhood series, which includes the books Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Little Altars Everywhere, Ya-Yas in Bloom, and The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder.

Wells was born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana, where her family owned and ran a cotton farm. She attended Louisiana State University and, after graduating, the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she studied language and consciousness with Allen Ginsberg and Choyyam Trungapa Rinpoche, as well as acting, movement, and voice with members of The Living Theater. She then went to New York City, where she studied the Stanislavski Method of acting.

John Michael Green is an American author, YouTube content creator, podcaster, and philanthropist. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time. Green's rapid rise to fame and idiosyncratic voice are credited with creating a major shift in the young adult fiction market. Aside from being a novelist, Green is well known for his work in online video, most notably his YouTube ventures with his brother Hank Green.

Joanne Rowling, also known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author and philanthropist. She wrote Harry Potter, a seven-volume children's fantasy series published from 1997 to 2007. The series has sold over 600 million copies, been translated into 84 languages, and spawned a global media franchise including films and video games. The Casual Vacancy (2012) was her first novel for adults. She writes Cormoran Strike, an ongoing crime fiction series, under the alias Robert Galbraith.

Stephenie Meyer (; née Morgan; born December 24, 1973) is an American novelist and film producer. She is best known for writing the vampire romance series Twilight, which has sold over 100 million copies, with translations into 37 different languages. Meyer was the bestselling author of 2008 and 2009 in the U.S., having sold over 29 million books in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2009. Meyer received the 2009 Children's Book of the Year award from the British Book Awards for Breaking Dawn, the Twilight series finale.

An avid young reader, she attended Brigham Young University, marrying at the age of twenty-one before graduating with a degree in English in 1997. Having no prior experience as an author, she conceived the idea for the Twilight series in a dream. Influenced by the work of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, she wrote Twilight soon thereafter. After many rejections, Little, Brown and Company offered her a $750,000 three-book deal which led to a four-book series, several spin-off novels and novellas, and a series of commercially successful film adaptations. Aside from young adult novels, Meyer has ventured into adult novels with The Host (2008) and The Chemist (2016). Meyer has worked in film production and cofounded production company Fickle Fish Films. Meyer produced both parts of Breaking Dawn and two other novel adaptations.

Kathryn Stockett is an American novelist. She is known for her 2009 debut novel, The Help, which is about African-American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1960s.

Stockett worked in magazine publishing while living in New York City before publishing her first novel, which she began writing after the September 11th attacks. The Help took her five years to complete, and the book was rejected by 60 literary agents before agent Susan Ramer agreed to represent Stockett. The Help has since been published in 42 languages. As of August 2012, it has sold ten million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.The Help climbed best seller charts a few months after it was released.

Madeleine Sophie Wickham, known by her pen name Sophie Kinsella, is an English author. The first two novels in her best-selling Shopaholic series, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic and Shopaholic Abroad, were adapted into the film Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009). Her books have sold over 40 million copies in more than 60 countries, and been translated into over 40 languages.

William McGuire Bryson is an American–British journalist and author. Bryson has written a number of nonfiction books on topics including travel, the English language, and science. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 and 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship. He served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and former physician. His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book and his subsequent novels have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and have featured an Afghan as the protagonist.

Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter, and film producer. He has published twenty-three novels, all New York Times bestsellers, and two works of non-fiction, with over 115 million copies sold worldwide in more than 50 languages. Among his works are The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, and Message in a Bottle which, along with 8 other books, have been adapted as feature films.

Lisa Genova (born November 22, 1970) is an American neuroscientist and author. She self-published her debut novel Still Alice (2007), about a Harvard University professor who suffers early onset Alzheimer's disease. The book gained popularity and was acquired by Simon & Schuster; it was published in January 2009 by Pocket Books (now Gallery Books). There are over 2.6 million copies in print, and it has been translated into 37 languages. It was chosen as one of the thirty titles for World Book Night 2013. The book was adapted into a film in 2014 and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Julianne Moore's highly acclaimed performance as Alice Howland.

Genova has written fiction about characters dealing with neurological disorders. Gallery Books published her next three novels, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, and Inside the O'Briens, all New York Times bestsellers.

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London, England that The Independent called "...theatre at its best".

Emily Fisk Giffin (born March 20, 1972) is an American author of several novels commonly categorized as chick lit.

Her notable works include Something Borrowed, Heart of the Matter and The One and Only.

Emily Giffin was born on March 20, 1972. She attended Naperville North High School in Naperville, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), where she was a member of a creative writing club and served as editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper. Giffin earned her undergraduate degree at Wake Forest University, where she double-majored in history and English and also served as manager of the basketball team. She then attended law school at the University of Virginia.

After graduating from law school in 1997, she moved to Manhattan and worked in the litigation department of Winston & Strawn. In 2001, she moved to London and began writing full-time. Her first young adult novel, Lily Holding True, was rejected by eight publishers. Giffin began a new novel, then titled Rolling the Dice, which became the bestselling novel Something Borrowed, released in 2004, which received positive reviews and made it to the New York Times bestsellers list.