- Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer -- courtier, diplomat, and poet -- is arguably one of the most important figures in English literature. His philosophically profound, yet at times bawdy, body of work represents true ... - Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet popular throughout Europe during his time. In some ways Scott was the first author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and specifically, … - William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, "Lyrical Ballads". Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be "The Prelude", an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death. - John Keats
John Keats was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. - Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson, was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. - Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë (April 21, 1816 - March 31, 1855) was an English novelist and the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels have become enduring classics of English literature. - J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and university professor, best known as the author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout Roman Catholic. - Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë was a British novelist and poet, now best remembered for her only novel "Wuthering Heights", a classic of English literature. Emily was the second eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters, being younger than Charlotte and older than Anne. She published under the masculine pen name Ellis Bell. - Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson OBE (born August 27, 1959) is a British novelist. Born in Manchester, she was adopted by a Pentecostal couple, who brought her up in Accrington, Lancashire, with ambitions for her to be a Christian missionary. She announced that she was having a lesbian affair at the age of 16, and left home. She went on to study English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. After moving to London, her first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", … - Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (born October 5 1949, London) is an English author. Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm and his father had left home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers at the age of 5 and wrote a play about Guy Fawkes when he was 9. He also first realised he was gay at the age of 7. Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, … - John Sutherland
John Sutherland (born 1938) is an English lecturer, emeritus professor, newspaper columnist and author. Now Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, John Sutherland began his academic career after graduating from the University of Leicester as an assistant lecturer in Edinburgh in 1964. He specialises in Victorian fiction, 20th century literature, and the history of publishing. - Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. Some consider him Africa's most distinguished playwright, as he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African since Albert Camus so honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family, specifically, an Egba family in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1934. He received a primary school education in Abeokuta and attended secondary school at Government College, Ibadan. - M. R. James
Montague Rhodes James, OM (August 1, 1862-June 12, 1936), who published under the byline M. R. James, was a noted British mediaeval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905-1918) and of Eton College (1918-1936). He is best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein, which are widely regarded as among the finest in English literature. - Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC (July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is well-known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village". - David Mitchell
David Mitchell (born January, 1969) is an English novelist. He has written four novels, two of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The latest, "Black Swan Green", was longlisted for the 2006 award. Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an MA in Comparative Literature. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, … - Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill (born September 3, 1938) is an English writer of stage plays known for her use of non-realistic techniques and feminist themes. She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and a leading woman writer. She is classed as a Post-modern playwright due to her themes and techniques such as use of multi-role and fragmented narrative. - Sebastian Faulks
Sebastian Faulks is a highly acclaimed British novelist. - Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson (b. 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time. The marriage lasted only two years, but produced Atkinson's first daughter, Eve, who was born in 1975. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. - Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson (born 18 February 1953) is a British poet born in Salford, Lancashire. With the exception of five years, he grew up in Liverpool. He graduated from the University of York in 1974. In the 1970s he edited the poetry magazine "Perfect Bound" and helped organize several Cambridge International Poetry Festivals. He was awarded a doctorate in 1981 for a thesis on the poetry of Donald Davie, Roy Fisher and Charles Tomlinson. - Carol Shields
Carol Ann Shields ,BA, MA, CC, OM, D.Litt., LL.D, FRSC (June 2, 1935 - July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her successful 1993 novel "The Stone Diaries", which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award - Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill (born June 18, 1932) is an English poet, professor of English Literature and religion, and co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University, Massachusetts, USA. - Christopher Ricks
Christopher Ricks (born 1933) is a British literary critic and scholar. He is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University (USA) and Co-Director of the Editorial Insitute at Boston University, and since 2004 Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (England). He was born in Beckenham and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a first in English. He served in the Green Howards in the British Army in 1953/4 in Egypt. - Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst (born 26 May 1954) is a British novelist, and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for "The Line of Beauty". - David McCullough
David Gaub McCullough (born July 7, 1933) is an American historian and bestselling author. A two-time winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he is widely referred to as a "master of the art of narrative history." Among his most well-known books are "The Path Between the Seas", "Truman", "John Adams", and his most recent volume, "1776" (a "New York Times" and Amazon bestseller). - Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss (born 1955) is an English writer and journalist who was born in Kingston upon Thames. She was educated at Tiffin Girls' School (1966-73) and is a graduate of University College London, where she read English (taking the best first in her year). She is best known for her commercially successful book on punctuation, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation". - Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay MBE (born 1961) is a Scottish poet and novelist. She was born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple and brought up in Bishopbriggs, a suburb of Glasgow. Initially harbouring ambitions to be an actress, she decided to concentrate on writing after Alasdair Gray read her poetry and told her that writing was what she should be doing. - Philip Hensher
Philip Michael Hensher (born February 20 1965) is an English novelist, critic and journalist. Hensher was born in South London, although spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton Comprehensive School. He has degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons. He has published a number of successful novels, … - Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell (born March 22, 1924, Pasadena, California, USA) is a cultural and literary historian, and professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century English literature, the world wars, and social class, among others. Fussell was drafted into the Army in 1943, at age 19. In October 1944 he landed in France, as part of the 103rd Infantry Division. - Jenny Joseph
Jenny Joseph (born 7 May 1932) is an English poet. Her poem "Warning" ("When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn't go and doesn't suit me... ") was identified as the UK's "most popular post-war poem" in a 1996 poll by the BBC. She was born in Birmingham, and studied English literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before becoming a journalist. - Tom Paulin
Thomas Neilson Paulin (born January 25, 1949 in Leeds, England) is a Northern Irish poet and critic well-known for his strong political views. He lives in England, where he is the GM Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford. - Henry van Dyke
Henry van Dyke was an American author, educator, and clergyman. He graduated from Princeton University, 1873, and from Princeton Theological Seminary, 1874 and served as a professor of English literature at Princeton between 1899 and 1923. In 1908-09 Dr. Van Dyke was an American lecturer at the University of Paris. By appointment of President Wilson he became Minister to the Netherlands and Luxembourg in 1913. - David Daiches
David Daiches was a Scottish literary historian and critic, scholar and writer. He wrote extensively on English and Scottish literature and Scottish culture. - Gillian Beer
Dame Gillian Beer, DBE (b. 27 January 1935, Surrey, England) is a British literary critic. Born Gillian Patricia Kempster Burley, Beer studied English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. She was a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, for 30 years. She was later King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, and later President of Clare Hall. She served as chair of the judges for the Booker Prize in 1997. - Helen Gardner
Professor Dame Helen Louise Gardner DBE (1908-1986) was an English literary academic and critic. A fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford from 1942, she became Merton Professor of English literature in the University of Oxford in 1966. Her specialist areas were T. S. Eliot, the Metaphysical poets, Milton and religious poetry, with many essays published on the subjects, as well as on literary criticism itself. She edited "The New Oxford Book of English Verse, … - Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (born 15 April 1958, Cole's Hill, Birmingham, England) is a British Rastafarian writer and dub poet, and is well known in contemporary English literature. - Sidney Lee
Sir Sidney Lee was an English biographer and critic. He was born Solomon Lazarus Lee at 12 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, London and educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in modern history in 1882. In the next year he became assistant-editor of the "Dictionary of National Biography". In 1890 he became joint editor, and on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891 succeeded him as editor. - Jon Stallworthy
Jon Stallworthy (born January 18, 1935 in London) is Professor of English at the University of Oxford. He is also a Fellow and Acting President of Wolfson College, a poet, and literary critic. Stallworthy's parents, John Arthur and Margaret Stallworthy, were from New Zealand and moved to England in 1934. Stallworthy started writing poems when he was only seven years old. He was educated at the Dragon School, Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, … - Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik is an American novelist. She was born in New York in 1973, a second-generation American. Her father is of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, and her mother is an ethnic Pole. She studied English Literature at Brown University, and holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Columbia University. She participated in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, until she discovered she preferred writing to game design. - Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous, is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, to a German Ashkenazi mother and Algerian Sephardic father. She earned her agrégation in English in 1959 and her Docteur en lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English literature, and the works of James Joyce. - Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 - 17 June 1957) was the first writer to publish an English-language novel using what was to become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her thirteen novel sequence "Pilgrimage" is one of the great 20th century works of modernist and feminist literature in English.
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