Jules Verne in Eighty Days" (1873). Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a
Robin Stevens (author) Stevens studied English at the University of Warwick, later gaining an MA in crime fiction from King's College London. She appeared as Captain of the Warwick University team on University Challenge. Before becoming a full-time author, Stevens worked as a bookseller at Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford, and as an editor at Egmont. Stevens started writing "Murder Most Unladylike" as part of National Novel Writing Month in November 2010, but did not send it to agencies for two years. Stevens has cited the Golden Age of Detective Fiction as an influence on her work – particularly the authors Agatha Christie, Ngaio