Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and died in 1930. Within those years was crowded a variety of activity and creative work that made him an international figure and inspired the French to give him the epithet 'the good giant'.

He was the nephew of 'Dickie Doyle' the artist, and was educated at Stonyhurst, and later studied medicine at Edinburgh University, where the methods of diagnosis of one of the professors provided the idea for the methods of deduction used by Sherlock Holmes. He set up as a doctor at Southsea and it was while waiting for patients that he began to write.

His growing success as an author enabled him to give up his practice and turn his attention to other subjects. His greatest achievement was, of course, his creation of Sherlock Holmes, who soon attained international status and constantly distracted him from his other work; at one time Conan Doyle killed him but was obliged by public protest to restore him to life.

And in his creation of Dr Watson, Holmes's companion in adventure and chronicler, Conan Doyle produced not only a perfect foil for Holmes but also one of the most famous narrators in fiction.

Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WWI he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist.

He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science-fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener’s Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, into a life of personal tragedy. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and that summer traveled with him and a host of other Romantic intellectuals to Geneva.

Her greatest achievement was piecing together one of the most terrifying and renowned stories of all time: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley conceived Frankenstein in, according to her, "a waking dream."

This vision was simply of a student kneeling before a corpse brought to life. Yet this tale of a mad creator and his abomination has inspired a multitude of storytellers and artists. She died on February 1, 1851.,

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish author best known for his 1961 science fiction novel Solaris. He also wrote several other SF works including Eden (1959) and His Master's Voice (1968). Lem's books have been translated into over 40 languages and sold over 45 million copies.

He was awarded numerous honours for his writing, including the City of Kraków's Prize in Literature, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Lem died in 2006, aged 84.