Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, Denmark,
the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager,
he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a
singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital,
Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage.
He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the
capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper
education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books
came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated
into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and
more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to
ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the
English-speaking world.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish children's author and
novelist, was educated at Aberdeen University before training as a
Congregational minister. Finding his own individualistic views
unacceptable to his parish, he gradually turned to literature. He
published over fifty volumes of fiction, verse, children's stories,
and sermons but is remembered chiefly for his fairy stories,
including The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and its sequel The
Princess and Curdie (1873).
Alison Larkin was born in Washington, DC, adopted at six weeks old
by British parents, and raised in England and Africa. After
graduating from Royal Holloway College, London University, and the
Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, she became a playwright and
classical actress on the British stage. Then, at twenty-eight, she
found her birth mother, who was living in Bald Mountain, Tennessee.
The experience turned her into a stand-up comic. She was soon
headlining at the Comic Strip in New York and the Comedy Store in
Los Angeles, while maintaining her theatrical career. She also
spent three years under a studio development contract to star in
her own sitcom with ABC, CBS, and Jim Henson Productions. Her
unusually wide range of voices can be heard in cartoons and movies,
from work by James Cameron and Robert Altman to Pocahontas and The
Wonder Pets. The audiobook of The English American, narrated by
Alison, won an AudioFile Earphones Award. She has narrated over
thirty audi books and lives in the Berkshires, western
Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
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