What country are novelists Jane Smiley and Melinda Haynes from?
Melinda Haynes Melinda Haynes (born 1955) is an American novelist. She grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. For much of her adult life she was a painter. In 1999, she wrote her first published novel, "Mother of Pearl", while living in a mobile home in Grand Bay, Alabama. Melinda Haynes currently resides in Mobile, Alabama with her husband, Ray. Her writing is intimately connected with the Mississippi of the 1950s and the 1960s.
Helen Simpson (author) Helen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1957 in Bristol, in the West of England, and grew up first in Wealdstone then in a suburb of Croydon where she went to a girls' school. Her mother was a primary-school teacher and her father was a naval architect who later taught. The first from her family to go to university, she read English at Oxford where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce. She worked at "Vogue" for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, "Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories", 1990, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was followed by a second collection, "Dear George", in 1995. "Hey Yeah Right Get A Life", 2000, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize, and was renamed "Getting a Life" for its US publication. She was awarded the E.M. Forster Award in 2002 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent story collections are: "Constitutional" (2005), renamed "In the Driver's Seat" for its US publication; "In-Flight Entertainment" (2010); and "Cockfosters" (2015). "A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories" was published in 2012.