Literature

The people behind books, poems, and plays.

People in Literature

67 profiles

Novelist

Jane Austen

Writing Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Novelist

Charles Dickens

Writing Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol.

Novelist

Toni Morrison

Writing Beloved and winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Writer

Maya Angelou

Writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Poet

Rabindranath Tagore

Writing Gitanjali and songs that became two national anthems.

Writer

George Orwell

Writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Writer

J. R. R. Tolkien

Creating Middle-earth in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Writer

Jack London

Writing The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Writer

A. A. Milne

Creating Winnie-the-Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood.

Poet

Lord Byron

Writing Don Juan and embodying the rebellious Romantic poet.

Writer

Virginia Woolf

Writing Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

Writer

Jules Verne

Writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days.

Writer

Alice Walker

Writing The Color Purple.

Playwright

Bertolt Brecht

Writing Mother Courage and developing epic theatre.

Writer

Victor Hugo

Writing Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Writer

John Steinbeck

Writing The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

Writer

Dr. Seuss

Creating The Cat in the Hat, the Grinch and Green Eggs and Ham.

Writer

Gabriel García Márquez

Writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Writer

Douglas Adams

Creating The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Writer

Jack Kerouac

Writing On the Road and becoming a central Beat writer.

Writer

Hans Christian Andersen

Writing fairy tales including The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling.

Poet

Seamus Heaney

Writing poetry rooted in Irish rural life, history and moral conflict.

Novelist

Charlotte Brontë

Writing Jane Eyre, a novel centred on a woman’s independence and inner life.

Novelist

Harper Lee

Writing To Kill a Mockingbird.

Playwright

J. M. Barrie

Creating Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up.

Writer

Arthur Conan Doyle

Creating Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

Poet

Walt Whitman

Writing Leaves of Grass and expanding American free verse.

Writer

Thomas Hardy

Writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles and novels set in a changing rural Wessex.

Poet

Alexander Pushkin

Writing Eugene Onegin and helping shape modern Russian literature.

Poet

W. B. Yeats

Writing major Irish poetry and helping establish the Abbey Theatre.

Writer

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Writing the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Novelist

Pearl S. Buck

Writing The Good Earth and portraying rural Chinese life for international readers.

Writer

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Writing and illustrating The Little Prince.

Writer

Franz Kafka

Writing The Metamorphosis and The Trial.

Writer

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Writing The Scarlet Letter.

Writer

Wole Soyinka

Writing Death and the King’s Horseman and winning Africa’s first literature Nobel.

Writer

Alexandre Dumas fils

Writing The Lady of the Camellias, the source of La traviata.

Writer

Beatrix Potter

Creating Peter Rabbit and his illustrated animal world.

Writer

J. K. Rowling

Creating Harry Potter and the wizarding world.

Writer

Herman Melville

Writing Moby-Dick and its obsessive hunt for a white whale.

Writer

James Baldwin

Writing incisively about race, identity and belonging in America.

Writer

Enid Blyton

Creating the Famous Five, Noddy and generations of children’s adventures.

Writer

H. P. Lovecraft

Imagining cosmic horror and the Cthulhu mythos.

Writer

Jorge Luis Borges

Creating labyrinths, imaginary books and philosophical short stories.

Writer

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Writing Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Writer

Mary Shelley

Writing Frankenstein and its unsettling question of a creator’s responsibility.

Writer

Leo Tolstoy

Writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Writer

D. H. Lawrence

Writing Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Writer

Roald Dahl

Creating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and The BFG.

Writer

Agatha Christie

Creating Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and ingenious murder mysteries.

Writer

William Golding

Writing Lord of the Flies.

Writer

H. G. Wells

Imagining time travel, alien invasion and invisible men.

Writer

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing The Great Gatsby and the promises of the Jazz Age.

Writer

Truman Capote

Writing Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood.

Writer

Gore Vidal

Writing sharp political essays and novels that re-examined American history, power and sexuality.

Novelist

R. K. Narayan

Creating Malgudi, the fictional Indian town at the heart of Swami and Friends and The Guide.

Writer

P. G. Wodehouse

Creating Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, with comic plots powered by exquisite sentences and social misunderstandings.

Playwright

Oscar Wilde

Writing The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, with wit that exposes social hypocrisy.

Playwright

Arthur Miller

Writing Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, dramas about private failure and public pressure.

Novelist

John le Carré

Writing morally complicated spy novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Novelist

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Writing Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, novels of guilt, faith and moral conflict.

Novelist

Chinua Achebe

Writing Things Fall Apart, a landmark novel of Igbo life and colonial disruption.

Writer

Margaret Atwood

Writing The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopia about women living under a religious dictatorship.

Writer

Arundhati Roy

Writing the Booker-winning The God of Small Things and outspoken political essays.

Poet

William Blake

Creating visionary poems and images, including The Tyger and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Writer

C. S. Lewis

Creating The Chronicles of Narnia and writing influential explanations of Christian belief.

Writer

Rudyard Kipling

Writing The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories.