My Favourite Authors

As an individual, we surely have our own likes and hobbies. In my part, one of the things I love to do is reading and one of the items I really do give important is the book. I like to collect books especially those which are written by my favourite authors. I am honoured to introduce them to you and I hope what I will share gives so much insights to all you.


Paulo Coelho

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Paulo Coelho was born on August 24, 1947, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Coelho attended Jesuit schools and was raised by devout Catholic parents. He determined early on that he wanted to be a writer but was discouraged by his parents, who saw no future in that profession in Brazil. He was a rebellious teenager and his parents committed him to an asylum three times. When Coelho was 38 years old, he had a spiritual awakening in Spain and wrote about it in his first book, The Pilgrimage. Coelho has been married to his wife, the artist Christina Oiticica, since 1980. Together the couple spends half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a country house in the Pyrenees Mountains of France. In 1996, Coelho founded the Paulo Coelho Institute, which provides support to children and the elderly. He continues to write, following his own version of The Alchemist's "Language of the World." Some of the books he wrote were: The Winner Stands Alone; Aleph; Brida; Eleven Minutes; The Devil and Miss Prym; By the River Piedra I sat and Swept; and manuscript Found in Accra.


Joanne K. Rowling 

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Joanne Rowling (born July 31, 1965), who goes by the pen name J.K. Rowling, is a British author and screenwriter best known for her seven-book Harry Potter children's book series. J.K. Rowling was living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and struggling to get by as a single mom before her first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was published. The children's fantasy novel became an international hit and Rowling became an international literary sensation in 1999 when the first three installments of Harry Potter took over the top three slots of The New York Times best-seller list after achieving similar success in her native United Kingdom. The series has sold more than 450 million copies and was adapted into a blockbuster film franchise. Rowling published the novel The Casual Vacancy in 2012, followed by the crime novel Cuckoo Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith in 2013. In 2016, she released a play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and a movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.



Nicholas Sparks

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Born on December 31, 1965, Nicholas Sparks wrote his first (unpublished) novel while sidelined by a sports injury. He then attended the University of Notre Dame and went into sales. Business setbacks got him writing again and in 1995 he finished The Notebook, which was a best-seller and later turned into a hit movie. He followed this novel with Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe and The Longest Ride, among others. The second of three children born to Patrick Sparks, a college professor, and his wife Jill, a homemaker, Nicholas spent the early part of his childhood moving around with his family as his father finished up his graduate work. They lived in Minnesota, then Los Angeles, later Grand Island, Nebraska, and finally Fair Oaks, California, where the Sparks clan found a permanent home. Nicholas went on to graduate from high school there in 1984, becoming the class valedictorian. College brought him to Indiana and the University of Notre Dame, which had offered the athletic Sparks a full track scholarship. In 1985, during his freshman year, Sparks was part of a relay team that set a school track record that still stands. But the season did not end on a good note for the future author: An Achilles tendon injury slowed things down for Sparks, and forced him to spend the summer recuperating. Once again, though, Sparks's triumph gave way to devastation when his father was killed at the age of 54 in an automobile accident. The grieving author turned to writing as a source of comfort, penning a story about a man who writes letters to his deceased wife and sends them out to sea in bottles. The book, later titled Message in a Bottle, was inspired by his parents' relationship. Skeptical that he'd really made it as a writer, Sparks continued to sell pharmaceuticals while he wrote the book. He finally retired from sales in February 1997, when he managed to sell Message in a Bottle to a Hollywood studio before the book was even completed. In 2008, Sparks's published his 14th novel, The Lucky One, followed by The Last Song (2009), Safe Haven (2010) and The Best of Me (2011). The Best of Me was developed into the 2014 film by the same title. The movie starred James Marsden and Michelle Monaghan as two high school sweethearts who meet up years later. Sparks published The Longest Ride in 2013. Two years later, the romantic drama was adapted into a film, starring Scott Eastwood, Britt Robertson, Jack Huston, Alan Alda, Melissa Benoist, and Lolita Davidovich. Another one of his books, 2007's The Choice, hit the big screen in 2016. 

John Grisham

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John Grisham Jr. was born on February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The second-oldest of five siblings, he developed a love for books early on. Grisham and his family moved around for a while, due to job opportunities for his father, who worked in construction, eventually settling in Southaven, Mississippi. Initially thinking of a pro baseball career and working a variety of jobs before college, Grisham went on to study accounting at Mississippi State University and then law at the University of Mississippi, graduating in 1981. During a trial in 1984, Grisham heard the horrifying details of a young girl recounting her experience of surviving rape. This catalyzed the attorney to start writing a novel that examined the issue, focusing on the actions of a fictional father and an attorney. The finished book, A Time to Kill, would initially get a 5,000-copy printing from Wynwood Press. After leaving politics in 1990 and closing his law practice, Grisham moved to Oxford, Mississippi with his family and devoted himself more completely to his new calling. The galley of his next novel, The Firm, ended up being circulated in Hollywood, and the film rights to the book were bought by Paramount for more than half a million dollars. The novel was sold to Doubleday. The Firm (1991) was on The New York Times best-seller list for nearly 50 weeks, becoming the top-selling book of the year. The film version was released in 1993 and starred Tom Cruise, Holly, Hunter and Gene Heckman. A Time to Kill would later be picked up as a paperback by Dell Publishing and became a best seller as well. While writing his next novel, The Pelican Brief, Grisham took the words of a retail chain executive to heart and made the commitment to complete a book a year. The Pelican Brief was published in 1992 and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. In the coming years, Grisham followed with an array of hit titles, including The Client (1993), The Runaway Jury (1996), Bleachers (2003), Playing for Pizza(2007) and The Litigators (2011), among many others. His Time to Kill sequel, Sycamore Row, was released in 2013. More recent titles include Gray Mountain(2014), Rogue Lawyer (2015) and The Whistler (2016). Grisham has worked in other literary genres outside of the adult novel as well, as seen with his nonfiction work The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town (2006), the short-story collection Ford County and the young adult series Theodore Boone.