Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne, a pioneering science-fiction writer, was born in the French port city of Nantes on 8 February, 1828, to Pierre Verne, a successful lawyer, and his wife Sophie. Verne published Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863, an immediate hit, followed by Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and his two most influential books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) that combined the newly developing genre of travel writing with Verne's own experimentation with science fiction. Since 1979, he has been the second most translated writer in the world. Verne died of old age and illness on 24 March 1905.