QUESTION: biographical information

question / pregunta: 

I am writing a curriculum for volunteers doing service in the Global South and am including some excerpts from popular books about international development. For all sources I try to include information about the author, including dates of birth (and death if applicable). I cannot find the dates of birth for Paul Collier (author of The Bottom Billion) or William Easterly (author of The White Man's Burden). Can you please help me find them?

Answers

For living authors in academia, this information is not always readily available. Current library practice only requires dates to be added to an author's name when there is a potential confusion with another similarly-named author.

The current Library of Congress authority record for Paul Collier - which is the official site in the US for standardized author information - does not give a birth date. None of the biographical notes I found on the web give this information, either. You could consider contacting him personally using the contact info search for the University of Oxford, where he is a professor of economics. (Or just see his page.)


The same goes for Easterly's LoC authority record, and likewise some web searching doesn't reveal a birth date. Again similarly, if you are really set on getting his birth year, you could consider contacting him through the information on his NYU home pages.