- Orhan Pamuk
The novelist Orhan Pamuk was born on June 7, 1952 in Istanbul and carries the distinct honor of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. Pamuk graduated from the Department of Journalism of Istanbul University in 1976, and completed his graduate studies at the same institution in 1979. Even though he was educated in journalism, after the 1970s, Orhan Pamuk made literature his profession. - 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. - Rabindranath Tagore
(7 May 1861 - 7 August 1941), also known by the sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj philosopher, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A cultural icon of Bengal and India, he became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Pirali Bengali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore first wrote poems at age eight. - Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born 10 October 1930) is an English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays "The Birthday Party" (1957), "The Caretaker" (1959), "The Homecoming" (1964), and "Betrayal" (1978), and also for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as "The Servant" (1963), "The Go-Between" (1970), "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1980), … - Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian, born January 4, 1940 in Ganzhou (Jiangxi province) in eastern China, is today a French citizen. Writer of prose, translator, dramatist, director, critic and artist. Gao Xingjian grew up during the aftermath of the Japanese invasion, his father was a bank official and his mother an amateur actress who stimulated the young Gao's interest in the theatre and writing. - Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott (born January 23, 1930) is a West-Indian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who writes mainly in English. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time of his birth, is intensely related to the symbolism of myth and its relationship to culture. - Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz (December 11 1911 – August 30 2006) was an Egyptian novelist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature who managed to modernize Arabic literature. He is regarded as one of the first writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq al-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. - Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18 1931), is a Nobel Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialog, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels "The Bluest Eye", "Song of Solomon", and "Beloved", which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. - Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (Can) (30 November 1874 - 24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also a soldier in the British Army. He has been studied to a unique extent as part of modern British and world history. - Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes. - Kenzaburo Oe
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. - George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for "Pygmalion". He was a strong advocate for socialism and women's rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education. - Albert Camus
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 - January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher. Although he is often associated with existentialism, Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist. - Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney 's attempts to develop poetic language in which meaning and sound are intimately related result in concentrated, sensually evocative poems characterized by assonant phrasing, richly descriptive adjectives, and witty metaphors. Heaney's poems also tend to mirror social and cultural divisions in contemporary Northern Ireland. - Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 - 22 December 1989) was an Irish dramatist, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition. His work grew increasingly cryptic and attenuated over his career. The perceived pessimism in Beckett's work is mitigated both by a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, … - T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26 1888 – January 4 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and "Four Quartets"; the plays "Murder in the Cathedral" and "The Cocktail Party"; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". - V. S. Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, T.C. (born August 17, 1932, in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity and Bhumihar Brahmin heritage from Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India. Naipaul lives now in Wiltshire, England. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. - Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow, born Solomon Bellows, (Lachine, Quebec, Canada, June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005 in Brookline, Massachusetts) was an acclaimed Canadian-born American writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and the National Medal of Arts in 1988. Bellow is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening. Bellow drew inspiration from Chicago, his adopted city, … - Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced:), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. He was a leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. - Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the penname and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and communist politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. Having his works translated into dozens of languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda was accomplished in a wide variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems (such as "White Hills"), surrealist poems, historical epics, … - William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner's writing is often criticized as being dense, meandering and difficult to understand due to his heavy use of such literary techniques as symbolism, allegory, multiple narrators and points of view, non-linear narrative, … - Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English author and poet, born in India, and best known today for his children's books, including "The Jungle Book" (1894), "The Second Jungle Book" (1895), "Just So Stories" (1902), and "Puck of Pook's Hill" (1906); his novel, "Kim" (1901); his poems, including "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), and "If—" (1910); and his many short stories, … - Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Nicknamed "Papa", he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris known as "the Lost Generation", as described in his memoir "A Moveable Feast." He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. - Dario Fo
Dario Fo (born March 24, 1926) is an Italian satirist, playwright, theater director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. His dramatic work employs comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He currently owns and operates a theatre company with his wife and leading actress Franca Rame. - William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded Abbey Theatre and served as its chief playwright during its early years. Yeats was a pillar of the Irish literary establishment and was as an Irish Senator for two terms. - Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 - August 12, 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul use modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, … - Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek (born 20 October 1946) is an Austrian feminist playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." - Halldór Laxness
Halldór Kiljan Laxness (born Halldór Guðjónsson was a 20th century Icelandic author of such novels as "Salka Valka", "Independent People", "The Atom Station", "Paradise Reclaimed", "Iceland's Bell", "The Fish Can Sing" and "World Light". He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. - John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27 1902 - December 20 1968) was one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he wrote "Of Mice and Men" (1937) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and subsequent Great Depression. - Yasunari Kawabata
was a Japanese short story writer and novelist whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese to receive the award. His works, which have enjoyed broad and lasting appeal, are still widely read internationally. - Gabriel García Márquez
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. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
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. - Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998) was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of cancer. - Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgaria-born novelist of Sephardi Jewish ancestry who wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. - José Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago, <small>GColSE</small> 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. - Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (May 30, 1960) was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet and writer, in the West best known for his epic novel "Doctor Zhivago". The novel is a tragedy, whose events span through the last period of Czarist Russia and early days of Soviet Union, and was first translated and published in Italy in 1957. In fact, Boris Pasternak, however, is most celebrated in Russia as a poet. - Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French writer. His first book was published in 1902, when he was already 36 years old. Thirteen years later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings." His mind sculpted by a passion for music and discursive admiration for exceptional men, … - Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996), born Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian poet and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987) and was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992). He had an honorary degree of the University of Silesia. - Günter Grass
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, … - Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse (pronounced) (2 July 1877 - 9 August 1962) was a German-born poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best known works include "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha", and "The Glass Bead Game" (also known as "Magister Ludi") which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.
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