Literature

Homer

750 BCE–650 BCE · Author of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Sappho

630 BCE–570 BCE · Greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece

Virgil

70 BCE–19 BCE · Author of the Aeneid, Rome's greatest poet

Murasaki Shikibu

978–1014 · Author of The Tale of Genji

Rumi

1207–1273 · Persian poet, Sufi mystic

Dante Alighieri

1265–1321 · Author of The Divine Comedy

Miguel de Cervantes

1547–1616 · Author of Don Quixote

William Shakespeare

1564–1616 · Greatest playwright in the English language

Molière

1622–1673 · French playwright and actor

Jane Austen

1775–1817 · Pride and Prejudice

Jacob Grimm

1785–1863 · Grimm's Fairy Tales

Alexander Pushkin

1799–1837 · Father of Russian literature

Victor Hugo

1802–1885 · Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Hans Christian Andersen

1805–1875 · The Little Mermaid, fairy tales

Edgar Allan Poe

1809–1849 · Master of the macabre, The Raven

Charles Dickens

1812–1870 · A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist

Emily Brontë

1818–1848 · Wuthering Heights

Herman Melville

1819–1891 · Moby-Dick

Walt Whitman

1819–1892 · Leaves of Grass, father of free verse

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1821–1881 · Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov

Jules Verne

1828–1905 · 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · War and Peace, Anna Karenina

Emily Dickinson

1830–1886 · Reclusive poetic genius

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Oscar Wilde

1854–1900 · The Picture of Dorian Gray, wit and charm

Arthur Conan Doyle

1859–1930 · Creator of Sherlock Holmes

Rabindranath Tagore

1861–1941 · First non-European Nobel laureate in Literature

H.G. Wells

1866–1946 · The War of the Worlds, science fiction pioneer

Marcel Proust

1871–1922 · In Search of Lost Time

Virginia Woolf

1882–1941 · Mrs Dalloway, modernist pioneer

James Joyce

1882–1941 · Ulysses, literary revolutionary

Franz Kafka

1883–1924 · The Metamorphosis, surreal fiction

Agatha Christie

1890–1976 · Best-selling mystery novelist ever

J.R.R. Tolkien

1892–1973 · The Lord of the Rings, Middle-earth

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1896–1940 · The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway

1899–1961 · The Old Man and the Sea, Nobel laureate

Jorge Luis Borges

1899–1986 · Labyrinths, master of magical realism

George Orwell

1903–1950 · 1984, Animal Farm

Roald Dahl

1916–1990 · Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

James Baldwin

1924–1987 · Go Tell It on the Mountain, civil rights essayist

Gabriel García Márquez

1927–2014 · One Hundred Years of Solitude

Maya Angelou

1928–2014 · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Chinua Achebe

1930–2013 · Things Fall Apart, father of modern African literature

Toni Morrison

1931–2019 · Beloved, Nobel Prize in Literature

Sylvia Plath

1932–1963 · The Bell Jar, confessional poetry

Wole Soyinka

1934–present · First African Nobel laureate in Literature

Haruki Murakami

1949–present · Norwegian Wood, surreal modern fiction