William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master…
Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile, was a poet, diplomat, and politician, widely considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th cen…
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). His family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bac…
Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and cultural innovator whose work has profoundly influenced the perception of comics as a legitimate art form, blending literary sophistication with e…
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎) was a Japanese author, and one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki.
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He reje…
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solita…
Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surreali…
Karen Russell graduated from Columbia University's MFA program in 2006. Her stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories, Conjunctions, Granta, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and Zo…
Banana Yoshimoto (よしもと ばなな or 吉本 ばなな) is the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto (吉本 真秀子), a Japanese contemporary writer. She writes her name in hiragana. (See also 吉本芭娜娜 (Chinese).)
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won…
Poems, published in such collections as Look, Stranger! (1936) and The Shield of Achilles (1955), established importance of British-American writer and critic Wystan Hugh Auden in 20th-century…
Andrea Faye Gibson was an American poet and activist. Their poetry focused on gender norms, politics, social justice, LGBTQ topics, life, and mortality. Gibson was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Co…
Sufism inspired writings of Persian poet and mystic Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi; these writings express the longing of the soul for union with the divine.
Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's appre…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead o…
Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the Nati…
Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, A Public Space, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent…
Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post an…
Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. While studying civil engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he realized his bigger passion l…
