Marius Berthus Jansen was Emeritus Professor of Japanese History at Princeton University. Jansen graduated from Princeton in 1943, having majored in European history of the Renaissance and Reformation…
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…
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of t…
James D. Hornfischer was an American literary agent, author, and naval historian. A one-time book editor at the publishing company HarperCollins in New York, Hornfischer was later president of Hornfisc…
清少納言 in Japanese Sei Shonagon (c. 966 -1017) was a Japanese author and a court lady who served the Empress Teishi (Sadako) around the year 1000 during the middle Heian period. She is best known as the…
Joseph "Jeph" Loeb III is an Emmy and WGA nominated American film and television writer, producer and award-winning comic book writer. Loeb was a Co-Executive Producer on the NBC hit show Heroes, and …
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was the son of a barrister. After trying a number of careers, including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, he started writing short stories in 1925. …
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th ce…
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and lives in England, where he teaches at the University of Kent. The most famous of his novels are Paradise, shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whi…
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was an Indonesian author of novels, short stories, essays, polemics, and histories of his homeland and its people. A well-regarded writer in the West, Pramoedya's outspoken and o…
Alexander Mikaberidze is assistant professor of European history at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. He holds a degree in international law from Tbilisi State University (Republic of Georgia,…
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent …
Sir Christopher Munro Clark FBA is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, he was…
David Pilling has reported from at least 50 countries over two decades as a foreign correspondent working for the Financial Times. That probably makes him 50 times more confused than the average perso…
