VERNE, Jules

“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real”

Born in Nantes, France, Jules Gabriel Verne was from an early age exposed to the excitements of a bustling maritime city, igniting his imagination for travel and adventure.  Sent by his father to study law in Paris, Verne was immediately attracted to the theatre, and although he gained his law degree, he concentrated on writing numerous plays, dramas and operettas, encouraged to do so by his great friend Alexandre Dumas.  In 1963 Verne wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon, the first in a sequence of 54 novels comprising his Voyages Extraordinaires series, in which he engaged to write about science and the natural world in an entertaining and picturesque format.  The following decades saw him create some of the greatest ever tales of science fiction, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days.  His story telling abilities combined with his innovative ideas soon led to a wider audience than his native France, each of his novels being translated into English and over the years becoming one of the most widely translated authors in the world, second only to Agatha Christie.  Along with H. G. Wells, Verne is often referred to as “the father of science fiction”, his remarkable imagination conjuring countless innovations years before their time, including the submarine, space travel, terrestrial flight and deep-sea exploration.  Such futuristic adventure stories have been entrancing readers for more than a century.

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