Alison Pargeter is a freelance North Africa and Middle East expert with a particular focus on Libya, Tunisia, Iraq (including the Kurdish region), and Egypt, as well as on political Islamist movements…
Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a r…
Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold milli…
Sir Antony James Beevor is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works, mainly on the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, and most recently the Russian Revolut…
Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but …
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Pari…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Efraim Karsh (Hebrew: אפרים קארש) is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013,…
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short…
Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and spent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in the history of …
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scie…
George Raymond Richard "R.R." Martin was born September 20, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was Raymond Collins Martin, a longshoreman, and his mother was Margaret Brady Martin. He has two si…
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short…
Sönke Neitzel is a German historian who has written extensively about the Second World War. Neitzel was educated at the University of Mainz and is currently Professor of Military History at the Univers…
Edward Samuel Behr was a journalist; he worked primarily as a foreign & war correspondent. He began his career in the early 1950s with the Reuters news agency, then worked for Time-Life, serving as bu…
Alaa al-Aswany (Arabic: علاء الأسواني), Egyptian Arabic (Masri) "علاء الاسوانى" (born 1957) is an Egyptian writer, and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya.
Iraj Pezeshkzad (1928 in Tehran - 12 January 2022 in Los Angeles) was an Iranian writer and author of the famous Persian novel "Dā'i Jān Napoleon" (دایی جان ناپلئون) (Uncle Napoleon, translated as "My…
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of h…
Bachtyar Ali Muhammed, also spelled as Bakhtiyar Ali or Bakhtyar Ali, (Kurdish: Bextyar Elî -بەختیار عەلی) Ali was born in the city of Slemani (also spelt as Sulaimani or Sulaymaniy), in Iraqi Kurdist…
Russian novelist Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (/ˈɡɒntʃəˌrɔːf, -ˌrɒf/; Russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Гончаро́в), best known for his novels A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Pre…
Bradley Hope, based in London, is the New York Times bestselling co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Gerald Loeb Award winner. Formerly a reporter …
