Anne Rice

Born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in New Orleans on 4 October 1941, Anne Rice expanded an old short story into Interview with the Vampire after her five-year-old daughter Michele died of leukaemia. The novel appeared in 1976, told from the vampire's own side rather than the hunter's, and thirteen more Vampire Chronicles followed, among them The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Under the name A. N. Roquelaure she wrote a set of explicit stories retelling Sleeping Beauty, of which Beauty's Punishment (1984) is the second. The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989) sent an immortal pharaoh into Edwardian London and Egypt. She bought a house in New Orleans in 1988 and kept the city as her home until 2005. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies. She returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 and stepped away from it again in 2010, and died on 11 December 2021, aged 80.