Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18 during a rainy summer at Lake Geneva, inventing science fiction in the process. Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, she produced a novel that has never been out of print and whose central question — what does a creator owe to what they create? — grows more urgent with every technological age.

• Nationality: GB
• Roles: writer