Jules Verne

Pioneering science-fiction writer Jules Gabriel Verne was born in the French port city of Nantes in 1828. Verne published Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863, an immediate hit, followed by numerous other novels, including his two most influential books, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. The Demon of Cawnpore, set in India in the aftermath of the Revolt of 1857, is being published for the first time in the country of its setting. Verne, who died of old age and illness in 1905, has come to be hailed as the Father of Science Fiction and continues to be read widely the world over.