Sir Herbert Edward Read, (December 4, 1893 - June 12, 1968) was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volume…
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of la…
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of t…
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…
Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have sur…
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, rea…
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migration…
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…
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Булгаков) was a Russian writer, medical doctor, and playwright. His novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, has been called one of th…
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). His family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bac…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne's two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are completely different from the romanticism f…
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…
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. He received acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities. In a career …
Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who lives in London and aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life. He can be contacted by email directly via www.alaindebotton.com
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…
Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short storie…
Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surreali…
“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from …
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
After World War I, French poet and literary theorist André Breton began to link at first with Dadaism but broke with that movement to write the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924.
Fyodor Sologub (Russian: Фёдор Сологуб, born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, Russian: Фёдор Кузьмич Тетерников; 1 March 1863 – 5 December 1927) was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayi…
People consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include The Overcoat (1842) and Dead Souls (1842).
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
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…
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…
