Donald Rayfield is an emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He translated Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories and Sketches of the C…
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in…
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts …
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…
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was born in Moscow to talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy's works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Though his parents were both Jewis…
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syrac…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Camilla Townsend (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is professor of history at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Her special interest is in the relations between indigenous peoples and Europeans throug…
Eugenia Ginzburg (Russian: Евгения Гинзбург) was a Russian historian and writer. Soon after Eugenia Ginzburg was born into the family of a Jewish pharmacist in Moscow, her family moved to Kazan. In 19…
Jeremy D. Popkin received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and holds an A.M. degree from Harvard University. When he was hired on a one-year contract at the Unive…
Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he w…
Vladislav M. Zubok (see also: Владислав Зубок) is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of A Failed Empire, Zhivago’s Children, a…
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of h…
Shota Rustaveli (Georgian: შოთა რუსთაველი) (born approx. c. 1160 – died after c. 1220), was a Georgian poet of the 12th century, and one of the greatest contributors to Georgian literature. He is auth…
Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian and American historian. Plokhy is currently the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, …
Among Iranian writers who introduced modernist techniques into Persian fiction. He is considered one of the greatest Iranian writers of the 20th century.
Bothayna El Essa (Arabic: بثينة العيسى) is a novelist from Kuwait. A well-known author in modern Arabic literature, her novel The Book Censor's Library was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award …