José de Sousa Saramago, <small>GColSE</small&gt; is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. His works commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor rather than the official story. Some of his works can also be seen as allegories. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Mario Vargas Llosa (birth name: Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa) (born in Arequipa, March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer who is one of Latin America's leading novelists and essayists.

is a popular contemporary Japanese writer and translator. His work has been described by the "Virginia Quarterly Review" as "easily accessible, yet profoundly complex."

Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris, born 3 July, 1964 in Barnsley, Yorkshire is a British author. Born to a French mother and an English father in her grandparents' sweet shop, her family life was filled with food and folklore. Her great grand mother was a known witch and healer. All of this was an environment that would play a key role as an adult in the development of her novels. She was educated at Wakefield Girls High School, …

Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 21, 1902 (see notes below) – July 24, 1991) was a Nobel Prize-winning Polish born American writer of both short stories and novels. He wrote in Yiddish.

Janet Paterson Frame ONZ, CBE, (August 28, 1924 - January 29, 2004), a New Zealand author, wrote eleven novels, four collections of short stories, a book of poetry, a children's book, and a three-volume autobiography. Famous for both her prose and her life story - she escaped lobotomy as a falsely-diagnosed mental patient only by receiving a literary prize just in time - she became a very private person in later life.

is a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, engage with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.

Milan Kundera (born April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) is a Czech-born writer who has written books in both Czech and French. He is best known as the author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", and "The Joke."

Kobo Abe (安部公房 "Abe Kōbō", pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe) was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. His name is romanized as "Kobo Abe" in Vintage International's English-language editions of his book, while Columbia University Press offers "Three Plays by Kōbō Abe".

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of wisdom. He was influenced by authors such as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Schopenhauer and G. K. Chesterton.

Gabriel José García Márquez, also known as Gabo is a Colombian novelist, journalist, publisher, political activist, and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gabriel García Márquez has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City. Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success.

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", …

Adolfo Bioy Casares was an Argentine fiction writer. Bioy Casares was born in Buenos Aires, the grandson of a wealthy landowner and dairy processor. He wrote his first story ("Iris y Margarita") at the age of 11. He was a friend and frequent collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges and wrote many stories with him under the pseudonym of H. Bustos Domecq. Bioy and Borges were introduced in 1932 by Victoria Ocampo, whose sister, Silvina Ocampo, Bioy Casares was to marry in 1940.

Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer born in Peru in 1943. Her father, who was serving as a Chilean diplomat in El Peru when Isabel was born, was the brother of Salvador Allende , the President of Chile overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup d' etat on September 11, 1973. As a result of that event, Isabel and her family were forced into exile. Indeed, the idea of exile has been a powerful molding force in the writing of Allende.

Carlos Fuentes is one of Latin America's most prominent men of letters. He is an essayist and literary historian of the highest caliber, as well as the author of numerous screenplays, dramas, and short stories; however, Fuentes is best known for his novels, which use complex and innovative narrative techniques to probe Mexican history. Born in 1928 in Panama City, the son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes was raised in Washington, D.C. Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile.

Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 - April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essay writer, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. For a long time it was believed that he was born in La Habana where his family moved immediately before his birth, but following his death a birth certificate was found in Switzerland.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, "Midnight's Children" (1981), which won the Booker Prize. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the long, rich and often fraught story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the East and the West.

Hubert Lampo was a Flemish writer, one of the founders of magic realism in Flanders. His most famous book is "De komst van Joachim Stiller" ("The coming of Joachim Stiller", 1960), in which a mysterious person, named Joachim Stiller, appears as a redeemer, under circumstances reminiscent of the death of Jesus. Other themes that occur in Lampo's work are the myths of Orpheus and the Holy Grail.

Tahar Ben Jelloun. In September 2006, Tahar Ben Jelloun was awarded a special prize for "peace and friendship between peoples" at Lazio between Europe and the Mediterranean Festival.

Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his "Paulicéia Desvairada" ("Hallucinated City") in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, …

What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever sat

Laura Esquivel is a Mexican author. She was born the third of four children of Julio César Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife Josefa Valdés. In her first novel "Como agua para chocolate" ("Like Water for Chocolate"), released in 1989, Esquivel uses magical realism to combine the ordinary and the supernatural. The novel, taking place in nineteenth century Mexico, shows the importance of the kitchen in Esquivel's life.

Franz Roh, was a German historian, photographer, and art critic. Roh was born in Apolda (Thuringia), Germany. He studied at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, and Basel. In 1920, he received his Ph. D. in Munich for a work on Dutch paintings of the 17th century.

Patrick Süskind is a German writer and screenwriter. He was born in Ambach am Starnberger See, near Munich in Germany. His father was Wilhelm Emanuel Süskind. He studied Medieval and Modern History at the University of Munich and in Aix-en-Provence from 1968-1974. In the 1980s he worked as a screenwriter, for "Kir Royal" and "Monaco Franze" among others. His best known work is the internationally acclaimed bestseller "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (1985).

Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning German author. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Since 1945, he has lived in (the now former) West Germany, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood. He is best known for his first novel, "The Tin Drum", a key text in European magic realism. His works frequently have a strong (left wing, socialist) political dimension, …

Mark Helprin is an award-winning American novelist and journalist, best known for his novel "Winter’s Tale" and his writing for "The New Yorker".

Arturo Uslar Pietri (May 16,1906 - February 26,2001) Was one of the most prominent Venezuelan figures of the twentieth century. He was a writer and an intellectual, who made important contributions as an educator, journalist, diplomat, politician and government official.

Eden Victoria Lena Robinson (born 19 January 1968) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Kitamaat, British Columbia, she is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations. She was educated at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. Robinson's critically acclaimed first book, "Traplines" (1995), was a collection of long short stories. She received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her second book, …

José Donoso was a Chilean writer. He was born in Santiago de Chile in 1924, and died there in December 1996. Donoso lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent some years in self-chosen exile in Mexico, the United States (Iowa) and Spain. After 1973, he claimed his exile was a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Donoso is the author of a number of remarkable stories and novels, …

Daniel Kehlmann is a German language author. He has both German and Austrian citizenship. His work "Die Vermessung der Welt" (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway as "Measuring the World", 2006) is the biggest selling novel in the German language since Patrick Süskind's "Perfume" was released in 1985. Kehlmann's works, and in particular "Die Vermessung der Welt", …

Keith Donohue (b. 1960) is an American novelist. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, he earned his B.A and M.A. from Duquesne University and his Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America. Currently he is Director of Communications for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grant-making arm of the U. S. National Archives in Washington, DC.

Julio Cortázar was a Belgian-born Argentine intellectual and author of several experimental novels and many short stories.

Carlos Thorne (b. 1923) is Peruvian novelist, writer and lawyer. He is credited as one of the most original and innovative Peruvian writers of the second half of the XXth century due to his unique blend of avant garde flashback techniques, following Malcolm Lowry and James Joyce, and his care for historical detail to the point of reproducing the Spanish of the Conquistadores.

Sara Gallardo was an influential Argentine author, noted, among other things, for her magical realism. Gallardo was born in Buenos Aires to an upper class family with extensive agricultural property. Despite, or because of, her pampered upbringing she became an astute observer and critic of the Argentine aristocracy, much along the lines of Charlotte Bronte. She was married twice, first to Luis Pico Estrada and then to Hector A, Murena. Gallardo began publishing in 1958.

Nancy Connor Springer (born 1948 in Montclair, New Jersey) is an American author of fantasy, Young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction. Her novel "Larque on the Wing" won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and she also received honors from the Mystery Writers of America. Nancy Springer contibuted to the short-story anthology Things Invisible to See: Gay and Lesbian Tales of Magic Realism.

Francisco Méndez was a Guatemalan poet and short-story writer born in Joyabaj, El Quiché. He published his first poem at the age of eighteen, and moved to the city of Quetzaltenango shortly after. A self-taught writer, he went on to publish numerous volumes of poetry, including the celebrated Nocturnos. He wrote for the Guatemala City newspaper El Imparcial from 1935 until his death, …

Juan Rulfo (16 May 1917 - 7 January 1986) was a Mexican novelist, short story writer, and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel "Pedro Páramo" (1955), and "El llano en llamas" (1953, "The Burning Plain"), a collection of short stories that includes his admired tale "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not to Kill Me!").

Mehmet Arif Onat Kutlar (Alanya, 1936-Istanbul, 1995), also known as Onat Kutlar, was a prominent Turkish writer and poet, founder of Turkish Sinematek and one of the founders of the Istanbul International Film Festival. He grew up in Gaziantep, Turkey. He studied law at Istanbul University and philosophy in Paris. His book, "Ishak" (1959), comprised of nine short stories, …

Yasushi Inoue was a Japanese writer whose range of genres included poetry, essays, short fiction, and novels. Although often remembered for his serious historical fiction of ancient Japan and the Asian continent, Inoue's work also included semi-autobiographical novels and short fiction of great humor, pathos, and wisdom like "Shirobamba" and "Asunaro Monogatari", …

Miguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Guatemalan writer and diplomat. He was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in literature "for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America." Asturias was born in Guatemala City and died in Madrid, Spain. In 1904 his family moved from the capital to Salamá, Baja Verapaz, where they remained until 1908.