Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid, an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aene…
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…
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890…
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 - 1599) was an important English poet and Poet Laureate best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabet…
Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society …
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturg…
Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many…
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. …
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own Eng…
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) …
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…
Richard McGuire is a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine. He has written and illustrated both children's books and experimental comics. His work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweene…
Born to Fante-speaking parents, with his father's side Armah descending from a royal family in the Ga tribe in the port city of Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana, [1] Armah, having attended the renowned Achimot…
Poetry of Indian dramatist and lyric poet Kalidasa (circa 375-circa 415) represents the height of the kavya style, which his epic poem Raghuvamsha and his lyric poem Meghaduta exemplify.
Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1651/3) was an English poet of the Renaissance. A member of a distinguished literary English family, Wroth was among the first female British writers to have achieved an enduring…
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received m…
Sir Thomas More (1477-1535), venerated by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was a councillor to Henry VII…
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…
Abolqasem Ferdowsi (Persian: ابوالقاسم فردوسی), the son of a wealthy land owner, was born in 935 in a small village named Paj near Tus in Khorasan which is situated in today's Razavi Khorasan province…