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Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1973, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world’s most successful writers.
He is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively. King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King’s books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald’s Game and It.
King was the recipient of America’s prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
‘King is a very remarkable and singular writer. He can catch dialogue, throw away an observation or mint a simile, sometimes, brilliantly…Storytelling is everything – and by golly does he know how to carry the reader.’ Observer
‘Doctor Sleep is King expertly returning to the milieu of his most beloved novels, combining not just elements from the original Shining but themes and imagery familiar from King’s books, including Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter and It. It also has a structure King has often utilised before, with a group of essentially good people having to band against a gang of baddies but within this structure King works masterful variations, showing just with a brilliant storyteller he is. When King is on form, as he is in Doctor Sleep, he has no rivals for sheer page-turning suspense. It is as addictive as anything he has written: a triumph from the world’s finest horror novelist.’ Sunday Express
‘It’s a gripping, powerful novel, all the more so for being patently heartfelt.’ Financial Times
‘King finds a mode of the supernatural that has a melancholic beauty while avoiding spiritualist blather – GuardianDoctor Sleep is a warm, entertaining novel by a man who is no longer the prisoner of his demons, but knows where to find them when he needs to call on them.’ Daily Telegraph
‘Thirty-six years on from his horror classic, THE SHINING, Stephen King’s sequel shows he still has plenty of creative steam.’ The Sunday Times
‘King has written a sequel, the tale of what happened to little Danny when he grew up. Need one say more? It cannot fail…the best thing to emerge from King’s glittering, warped imagination is of mundane, small-town America corrupted by hidden forces…you cannot but respect his ruthless expertise as a storyteller…even those of us who would never freely pick up a Stephen King must genuflect to a master.’ The Times
‘Stephen King’s frightscapes are among the most incredible in literature, yet one believes in them unquestioningly.’ Spectator
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