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.

Eleanor H. Porter was an American novelist from New Hampshire, born in 1868.

Although trained as a singer, she later turned to writing stories for children and romance and adventure novels for adults.

Her most famous novel is Pollyanna, written in 1913. She wrote 15 novels and many short stories during her career. Porter died in 1920.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester in 1849 and moved to America in 1865, where she launched a literary career in which she produced over forty books including A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). Frances died in 1924.

Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1873.

As a young man, he gained a reputation as a dandy and wit, and started publishing essays in magazines such as the notorious Yellow Book.

He dropped out of Oxford and soon published his first book.

Zuleika Dobson (1911) was his only novel, but he was also famous as a critic and caricaturist.

In 1910, he moved to Italy where he remained until his death in 1956.

Max Pemberton is a doctor, writer and journalist.

His first book, Trust Me, I'm a (Junior) Doctor, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was subsequently followed by two more books about his experiences working in the NHS, Where Does it Hurt? and The Doctor Will See You Now.

He is currently a columnist for the Daily Mail and Reader's Digest, and a regular contributor to the Spectator.

Richard Marsh (1857-1915) was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldman. He is best known for his supernatural thriller The Beetle- A Mystery, published in the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula and initially even more popular.

Heldman was educated at Eton and Oxford University. Several of the prolific Marsh's novels were published posthumously.

Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year.

They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote the two Jungle Books and Captains Courageous.

He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 1943) was a prolific short-story writer.

Known for his trademark wit even in the horror story 'The Monkey's Paw', for which he is best known Jacobs set most of his stories in the docks of East London, where he lived from a young age, as well as in Essex, where he moved in his middle age.

William Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824, the son of a successful and popular painter. On leaving school, he worked in the office of a tea merchant in the Strand before reading law as a student at Lincoln's Inn. However his real passion was for writing and, in 1850, he published his first novel, Antonina.

In 1851, the same year that he was called to the bar, he met and established a lifelong friendship with Charles Dickens. While Collins' fame rests on his best known works, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he wrote over thirty books, as well as numerous short stories, articles and plays. He was a hugely popular writer in his lifetime. An unconventional individual, he never married but established long-term liaisons with two separate partners. He died in 1889.