Sir William Gerald Golding was an Engish novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 198…
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". …
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots …
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is oft…
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman C…
Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition t…
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born …
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. D…
The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of h…
Morris Langlo West was born in St Kilda, Melbourne in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the Univers…
Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction review…
Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in …
Saint Teresa of Jesús, also called Saint Teresa of Ávila, was a prominent Spanish mystic, Carmelite nun, and writer of the Counter Reformation. She was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is conside…
Bishop Robert Emmet Barron is an acclaimed author, speaker, and theologian. He is the former Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at Mundelein Seminary near Chicago and also is the f…
Saint Ignatius of Loyola was the principal founder and first Superior General of the Society of Jesus. Ignatius paid particular attention to the spiritual formation of his recruits and recorded his me…
Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel …
Francis de Sales, C.O., T.O.M., A.O.F.M. Cap. (French: François de Sales; Italian: Francesco di Sales) was a Bishop of Geneva and is honored as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. His father sent hi…
Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear, a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week', and Somerset Maugham Prize winner in 2021, and Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, 2025. She is a freelance journalist wr…
