Angus Charles Graham (1919-1991) was born in Penarth, Wales. He studied theology at Oxford University and served as an interpreter in Malaya and Thailand while in the Royal Air Force. In 1946 he enrol…
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including hi…
Du Fu (Chinese: 杜甫, 712–770) was one of China's greatest poets and a central figure in the literary tradition of the Tang dynasty, often hailed as the "Poet Sage" (詩聖) for his moral integrity and the …
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Pete…
Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as "The Metamorphosis" (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals…
Eliot Weinberger is a contemporary American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in some thirty languages. Weinberger first gained…
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (19…
Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成) was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to re…
Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded a…
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solita…
Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉覚三), also known as Okakura Tenshin (岡倉 天心), was a Japanese scholar who contributed the development of arts in Japan. Outside Japan, he is chiefly remembered today as the author of
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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 Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an eth…
Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan. He graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in th…
Ikkyū (1394-1481) was an eccentric, iconoclastic Japanese Zen Buddhist priest and poet. He had a great impact on the infusion of Japanese art and literature with Zen attitudes and ideals.
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics col…
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…
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 No…
Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Krishna Dvaipāyana Vyāsa, also known as Vyāsa or Veda-Vyāsa (वेदव्यास, the one who classified the Vedas into four parts) is a central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions. He is traditonally re…
Lao Tzu (Chinese: 老子; pinyin: Lǎozǐ; Wade-Giles: Laosi; also Laozi, Lao Tse, Lao Tu, Lao-Tsu, Laotze, Laosi, Lao Zi, Laocius, Lao Ce, and other variations) was a mystic philosopher of ancient China, b…
Hanshan was a Buddhist monk, poet, and spiritual writer who lived during the Tang dynasty. Little is known about his life, including where and when he was born, or even whether he actually existed. In…
Roman mathematician Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, imprisoned on charges of treason, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, his greatest work, an investigation of destiny and free will, while a…
Lee Billings writes about the intersections of science, technology, and culture for Nature, Nautilus, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and many other publications.
Mosab Abu Toha is the winner of a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, Walcott Poetry Prize, and also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
