Jules Verne

Born in 1828, Jules Gabriel Verne became a French novelist whose partnership with publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel launched the Voyages extraordinaires - a procession of bestselling adventure novels grounded in the scientific knowledge and technology of the second half of the 19th century. Journey to the Center of the Earth arrived in 1864, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas in 1870, Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872. Beyond novels he wrote plays, poetry, and scientific studies; his work fed cinema from its birth and has been adapted into nearly every medium since. France and Europe claimed him as a literary force who shaped the avant-garde and surrealism, while the Anglosphere long dismissed him as a children's writer, partly because translations butchered and abridged his books. Since the 1980s that reputation has corrected itself. He ranks as the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, trailing only Agatha Christie, ahead of Shakespeare, and holds the title of most-translated French author in the 2010s.