Books, language & the lives behind the words
Literature & Ideas
Explore writers, poets and thinkers through sourced biographies, influential books, literary movements, public ideas and the historical worlds behind their work.
Explore writing in its historical and linguistic context. A novel’s narrator is not necessarily its author; an influential book, a political position and an award are discussed as distinct parts of a writer’s life.
African Literature
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Contemporary World Fiction
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Fiction & Public Life
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Novelist, essayist and public speaker
Haruki Murakami
Novelist, short-story writer and translator
Isabel Allende
Novelist and memoirist
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist and screenwriter
Margaret Atwood
Novelist, poet and essayist
Orhan Pamuk
Novelist and essayist
Stephen King
Novelist and short-story writer
Toni Morrison
Novelist, editor and essayist
Latin American Fiction
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Literature & Public Ideas
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Albert Camus
Novelist, essayist and playwright, 1913–1960
James Baldwin
Novelist, essayist and public intellectual, 1924–1987
Simone de Beauvoir
Philosopher, novelist and memoirist, 1908–1986
Umberto Eco
Novelist, semiotician and literary critic, 1932–2016
Modernism & Literary Experiment
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Poetry & Drama
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Political Fiction & Essays
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The Nineteenth-Century Novel
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Charles Dickens
Novelist, journalist and public performer, 1812–1870
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Novelist and journalist, 1821–1881
Jane Austen
Novelist, 1775–1817
Leo Tolstoy
Novelist, essayist and moral thinker, 1828–1910
Victor Hugo
Poet, novelist, playwright and public figure, 1802–1885