Famous Authors – Page 20 – Interesting Literature

Five Fascinating Facts about Agatha Christie

Interesting facts from the life of Agatha Christie (1890-1976), prolific author of detective novels

As it’s Agatha Christie’s birthday today – she was born 15 September 1890 – we felt it was time we honoured one of the most popular novelists who has ever lived. So here are five great facts about the life and work of Agatha Christie.

1. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of all time, with over 2 billion novels sold. The history of detective fiction is a history of bestselling writers – Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and more recently, crime writers like James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell – but Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (to give her her full name and title) is the most successful of them all.

Five Fascinating Facts about Anthony Burgess

Quick facts from the life of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange

1. His most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, may have been partly inspired by a dark event in Burgess’ past, shortly after he and his first wife married. For this classic novel, Burgess invented an entire new language, Nadsat (the name is taken from the Russian for ‘teen’ – i.e. a form of slang used by teenagers). Burgess, a gifted linguist, would later translate T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Persian (unfortunately, the translation has not been published). The book was made into an even more controversial film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Burgess had mixed feelings about the film, referring to it as ‘Clockwork Marmalade’, and he received just £5,000 in subsidiary rights for the film. Quite where the title A Clockwork Orange came from remains a mystery, but Gary Dexter has speculated that Burgess may have misheard ‘Terry’s Chocolate Orange’ in a noisy pub and liked the mondegreen so much he used it as the book’s title. The title has inspired the nickname ‘The Clockwork Orange’ for Glasgow’s metro system.

15 Interesting Facts about Reading for International Literacy Day

Interesting facts about literacy and reading in honour of International Literacy Day

In honour of International Literacy Day on 8 September, we’ve put together fifteen of our favourite facts about literacy and reading. Some are funny, some are surprising, and some are shocking; but all, we hope, are interesting in some way. This post might be considered a sequel to our previous post comprising 10 great quotations for International Literacy Day.

Reading for just six minutes a day can reduce stress by 68%.

‘Bibliotherapy’ is ‘the use of reading matter for therapeutic purposes’.

In 1879, Charles J. Dunphie published a book called Sweet Sleep: A Course of Reading Intended to Promote That Delightful Enjoyment.