Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in …
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, …
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) bro…
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical wri…
Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing pro…
Derek Walcott was a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained…
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times…
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the Span…
Jean Rhys, CBE (born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890–14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resid…
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for…
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she w…
Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, H…
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Karachi, where she grew up. She has a BA in Creative Writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While at …
Professor Dame Sue Black is one of the world's leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists. She is also the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University. She was the lead anthropolog…
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican writer and one of the best-known novelists and essayists of the 20th century in the Spanish-speaking world. Fuentes influenced contemporary Latin American literatur…
Kiran Millwood Hargrave is an award-winning writer whose work has been translated into over 30 languages and optioned for stage and screen. Almost Life, her third novel for adults, will be published b…
Ashley Herring Blake is a reader, writer, and mom to two boisterous boys. She holds a Master’s degree in teaching and loves coffee, arranging her books by color, and cold weather. She is the author of…
OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE is a graduate of Creative Writing and Law from Kingston University. Following her degree, she worked as an assistant editor at Kachifo, a Nigerian publishing house, and has been fr…
Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and disaster was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for …
Julia Armfield was born in London in 1990. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Masters in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. She was shortlisted for the …