American painter of Latvian Jewish descent. He immigrated with his family from Dvinsk (now part of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire) to the United States in 1913 when he was 10 years old.
Alessandro Baricco is an Italian writer, born at Torino in 1958. He's the author of several works, including the novels Lands of Glass (Selezione Campiello Award and Prix Médicis Étranger), Ocean Sea …
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He publis…
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walkin…
Kent Haruf was born in eastern Colorado. He received his Bachelors of Arts in literature from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965 and his Masters of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the U…
Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas), born 26 February 1958 (birth certificate) or 1956 on the French island of Réunion, is a controversial and award-winning French novelist. To admirers he is a wr…
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th ce…
Amélie Nothomb, born Fabienne Claire Nothomb, was born in Etterbeek, Belgium on 9 July 1966, to Belgian diplomats. Although Nothomb claims to have been born in Japan, she actually began living in Japa…
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his…
The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won…
Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Ci…
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and Art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolle…
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…
Influential treatises on painting, architecture, and sculpture of Italian writer Leon Battista Alberti introduced classical ideas into Renaissance art.
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…
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of “The Sympathizer,” awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book, “To Save and to Destroy,” explores…
Georgi Gospodinov is a writer, poet and playwright based in Sofia, Bulgaria. He studied Bulgarian Philology at Sofia University. Later he defended a PhD on New Bulgarian literature with the Bulgaria A…
Christopher Rothko, a writer and psychologist, is actively involved in managing the Rothko legacy by organizing and presenting exhibitions of his father's work around the globe.
David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature follow…
(Greek: Νίκος Καζαντζάκης) Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher. Widely considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize…
