- 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. - 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. - 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), … - 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. - 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, … - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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, … - 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, … - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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, … - 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. - Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, (18 May 1872 - 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, and pacifist. A prolific writer, he was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to those much less so. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was a prominent anti-war activist, … - 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. - 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. - 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. - Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930 he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values. His style is at times droll, satirical, and yet sympathetic. - 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, … - 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. - 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. - Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was a Nobel-prize winning American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced American drama to the dramatic realism pioneered by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, and was the first to use true American vernacular in his speeches. His plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, engaging in depraved behavior, … - Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun was a leading Norwegian author and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1920. - 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. - Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1928. Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old. In 1924, she converted to Catholicism. She fled Norway for the United States in 1940 because of her opposition to Nazi Germany and the German occupation, but returned after World War II ended in 1945. - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. - 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. - Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American writer based in New York City. He is noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: "V." (1963), "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966), … - Selma Lagerlöf
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish author and the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known internationally for "Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige" (a story for children, in translation "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils"), she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1909 "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings." - Sully Prudhomme
René-François-Armand (Sully) Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Literature, 1901. Prudhomme originally studied to be an engineer, but was to turn to philosophy and later to poetry. In writing poetry, he declared it as his intent to create scientific poetry for modern times. In character sincere and melancholy, he was a member of the Parnassus school, though, at the same time, his work displays characteristics of its own. - Horace Engdahl
Horace Engdahl (born December 30, 1948) is a Swedish literary historian and critic. He has been the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy since 1999. Engdahl was born in Karlskrona, Blekinge. He earned his B.A. in 1970 at Stockholm University, and began his doctoral studies there; he completed his Ph.D. only in 1987, with a study on Swedish romanticism, but had meanwhile been active as a literary critic, translator and journal editor, … - Maurice Maeterlinck
Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (August 29, 1862 - May 6, 1949) was a Belgian poet, playwright, and essayist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life. - Imre Kertész
Imre Kertész (born November 9, 1929) is a Jewish Hungarian author, Holocaust concentration camp survivor, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". Kertész' best-known work, Fatelessness ("Sorstalanság"), describes the experience of a fifteen-year-old boy in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz. - Harry Martinson
Harry Martinson (May 6, 1904 - February 11, 1978) was an author and poet. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson. The choice for Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson was very controversial as both were on the Nobel panel. They and Graham Greene, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov were the favored candidates that year. - Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (June 28, 1867 - December 10, 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Shmuel Yosef Agnon. One of the central figures in modern Hebrew fiction, Agnon was born in Galicia, later immigrated as a Zionist to Ottoman Palestine, and died in Jerusalem. His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European "shtetl" (village). In a wider context, he also contributed to the narrator's character in modern literature.
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