Jules Verne

Jules Verne (1828–1905) was born at Nantes and sent to Paris to study law, which he gave up for the theatre and then for fiction. With the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel he began the Voyages extraordinaires, the series of some sixty novels that included Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). He settled at Amiens, and is among the most translated of all authors.