Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) was a Nigerian writer. He is famous for his short stories, poetry and novels, including No Longer At Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). Achebe grew up in Ogidi, a town in eastern Nigeria, the child of Christian missionary parents.

After studying English literature at university, he wrote his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). It tells the story of a young Igbo man living in colonial Nigeria whose community is threatened by the arrival of white Europeans. It quickly became a success, selling more than 10 million copies around the world. It was the first modern novel to tell the story of Nigeria’s colonial history from an African point of view, and it sparked a wave of new writing across Africa.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was an English novelist. Her novels Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816) are well-loved for their humorous portraits of women, marriage, the landed gentry and society at the end of the 18th century. All her novels feature women as the main characters.

Austen was born in Hampshire. Her father taught her and her brothers and sister at home and made sure she had a good education, which was unusual for girls at the time. As a child, she wrote stories and put on plays with her brothers and sister, Cassandra. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published in 1811 when she was aged 36. It followed the romantic relationships of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Like all Austen’s novels, it was published anonymously. Pride and Prejudice soon followed. The novel chronicles the Bennet family’s efforts to find husbands for their daughters. It has since become one of the most popular novels of all time, selling over 20 million copies.

Jane Austen lived with her family all her life and never married. After her death in 1817, two more of her novels were published: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. More than 200 years later, Austen’s work is still hugely popular with readers. Film, TV and stage adaptations of her work are still being made to this day.

James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924–87) was an American writer famous for his novels and essays about race relations in America. He used his own experiences of living in the USA and Europe, as well as stories told by his friends and colleagues, to write essays such as those in The Fire Next Time (1963).

Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, to a poor family. After a short time as a young minister in the Pentecostal Church, he worked in the defence industry, where he encountered racism and segregation. He began work on a novel and moved to Paris, where he published his first novel Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953). Partly based on Baldwin’s own life, it was about a teenager growing up in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin wrote in a detailed, observational style. He liked to observe people’s behaviour closely and represent it in his essays and novels in a realistic way. He became known as a “disturber of the peace” because his writing revealed the inequality between white and black people in his home country.

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His 91 collected novels and short stories are known as La Comédie humaine, (The Human Comedy). Set in France during the period (1830–48) when the monarchy was restored after the Revolution, Balzac's novels describe the characters, their everyday lives and possessions in a detailed, realistic way. Some characters appear in more than one story. Most of Balzac’s novels are about relationships, families and money, but he was also interested in the impact of religion and the monarchy on ordinary French people. Balzac saw himself as a social historian, recording the manners and customs in French society. His work is still admired for this aspect today.

Brontë sisters

Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848) and Anne Brontë (1820–49) were all English novelists. The sisters were born in the small village of Thornton in Yorkshire. Together with their brother Branwell, two other sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, their father Patrick, a priest, and their mother Maria, they moved to the parsonage at Haworth, which became the family home in 1820. They would spend most of the rest of their lives there.

After their mother died in 1821, their aunt Elizabeth came to run the household. The elder Brontë sisters, Maria (aged 11) and Elizabeth (10), both died in 1825.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne spent some time at school and some time being taught at home. They began writing stories when they were young as a way of entertaining one another. Their first published work was a book of poetry which appeared in 1846 under the pen names Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. A year later, Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre and Anne’s Agnes Grey were published. Jane Eyre (1847) follows the story of a governess named Jane who falls in love with Edward Rochester when she is sent to work for him.

The following year, Emily’s only novel Wuthering Heights (1847) was published, but it did not sell well. It followed the stormy love story between Catherine and Heathcliff, an orphan boy who comes to live with her family. Set in the wild landscape of the Yorkshire Moors, it has become one of the best-known classic novels. After Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848, the sisters, still known only by their pen names, revealed their true identities.

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll (1832–98) was an English writer, illustrator, photographer and mathematician. He is best known for his children’s novel Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (1871), as well as playful "nonsense" poems such as Jabberwocky.

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Cheshire, England. He studied mathematics at Oxford University and went on­ to live in Christ Church, Oxford, where he worked as a scholar and teacher until 1881. When his first poems were published, he chose to use "Lewis Carroll" as a pen name instead of his own. He created it by translating his name into Latin (Carolus Ludovicus), switching the order around and then shortening it.

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) was a Spanish writer. His most famous book, Don Quixote (1605), is often regarded as the first modern novel. Cervantes was born in 1547 near Madrid. As a young man he joined the Spanish army and fought against the Ottoman Empire before being badly wounded in battle. When he returned home to Spain, he worked for the government and wrote in his spare time, achieving literary success in the later years of his life.

Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (1824–89) was an English writer. He is known for writing some of the first detective novels. He was born in London, where he was taught at home by his mother. His father was a painter. Collins studied law at university, and when he became a writer he used his knowledge of the law in his crime stories and novels. At the age of 27, he became good friends with Charles Dickens and worked with him for many years, writing and acting in his plays.

Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (born Daniel Foe, 1660–1731) was an English writer, journalist and merchant. His most famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719), is one of the first novels written in English. It tells the story of Crusoe, a sailor shipwrecked on a tropical island for 28 years. Along with his companion, Friday, who escaped captivity from cannibals, he learns to survive on the island before eventually being rescued by an English ship.

Defoe liked to present his novels as if they were autobiographies (life stories from the point of view of the author themselves). Because of this, when Robinson Crusoe was first published many people believed it to be a true story.

Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. During his childhood he lived through two devastating events that struck the city: first the Great Plague (1665), and then the Great Fire of London (1666) which destroyed nearly every house in his family’s street. As an adult, he wrote a fictionalized account of the Plague in his novel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1721).

Defoe became well-known for a detailed, first-person style of writing that allowed him to describe the lives of his characters intimately. His novel Moll Flanders (1722) was considered unusual at the time because the main character was a woman who had many different relationships. Defoe worked for most of his life as a merchant in the city, and he travelled widely around Europe. His controversial ideas about religion and politics often got him in trouble with the authorities, and he was sometimes arrested and even imprisoned.

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812–70) was an English novelist. His books, such as A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1853) and Great Expectations (1861), have become famous worldwide. Born in Portsmouth to a poor family, the young Charles had to finish school at the age of 11 and go to work in a factory producing boot polish. He later returned to school, but his experiences inspired many of the stories he would write. As a young man, Dickens worked as a journalist for a newspaper. His first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836–37) was published in instalments (a chapter at a time) in the newspaper. It was so popular that it quickly made his name as an author. More books followed: Oliver Twist, the story of Oliver, an orphan boy born in a workhouse and sent out to work with an undertaker, and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) about a young man who has to support his family after his father dies.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–81) was a Russian writer best known for his novels Crime and Punishment (1886), The Idiot (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He became famous for the way he wrote about the philosophical and psychological questions facing the Russian Empire in his day. Dostoevsky was born in Moscow. In his 20s, he narrowly escaped being executed for being part of a group of writers reading banned books. Instead, he was exiled to Siberia for four years, spending six more years in a prison camp in terrible conditions. When he returned, he wrote the novels which would make him famous.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was the Scottish writer of a series of popular detective stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02), featuring Sherlock Holmes and narrated by his assistant Dr Watson.

Born in Edinburgh to a wealthy family, Conan Doyle trained as a doctor and went to work on ships, as a surgeon and then a medical officer. When he returned to Britain he began writing short stories. His first detective story to feature Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet, was published in a magazine in 1887. It was the first time in fiction that a magnifying glass had been used as one of a detective’s tools.

George Eliot

George Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans, 1819–80) was an English novelist, poet and journalist. She wrote The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Many of her novels are set in the English countryside. They focus on relationships and the beauty found in everyday life, as well as the effects of political events on ordinary people of the time. Middlemarch tells the stories of a group of characters living in an English Midlands town in the early 1830s, at a time of major change brought by 1832 Reform Act and the coming of the railways. The Mill on the Floss follows brother and sister Tom and Maggie, growing up at Dorlecote Mill on the River Floss.

Gustave Flaubert

French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) is best known for his 1857 novel Madame Bovary. Flaubert was born in Rouen, northern France. His father was a surgeon. As a young man, he moved to Paris to study law, but he eventually gave it up and moved back to a small town near Rouen to devote himself to writing. He would live here, in a house by the River Seine, for the rest of his life.

In 1850, Flaubert began writing Madame Bovary. His careful, precise way of working meant that it took five years to write. The novel is about a woman, Emma Bovary, who becomes unhappy with her husband and family life, and goes in search of the luxurious experiences she has read about. She has affairs and runs into debt before dying miserably.

Flaubert's novel was one of the first to be written in a new realist style. It describes events and people “as they are” rather than showing them in a more dramatic or romantic light. This helped readers to feel like they understood Emma Bovary’s thoughts and feelings, and to see her story as a tragedy instead of judging her actions.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet. He was born in a rural village in Dorset that would later inspire the setting for his novels. As a young man, he trained as an architect and moved to London, but later returned to Dorset to work on his writing.

Hardy’s first successful novel was Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), a story about a woman named Bathsheba Everdene and her life and relationships. Like many of his novels it was set in Wessex, a region based on the Anglo-Saxon kingdom—and the landscape he knew best. Hardy’s later novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), were controversial because of the unconventional views on marriage and religion Hardy expressed in his writing. For the rest of his life Hardy devoted himself to writing poetry. Today, his tragic novels are considered to be some of the greatest love stories written in English.

The Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941) is best known for his novel Ulysses (1922). His other novels include Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which is partially based on his own life, and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Joyce was born in Dublin to a Catholic family, the eldest of ten children. As a young man he attended University College Dublin, where he studied English, Italian and French. After graduating he met Nora Barnacle, and together they left Ireland and moved abroad, settling in the city of Trieste (now in Italy). Joyce also lived in Zürich and Paris, but never returned to live in Ireland.

​​​​​​​Ulysses is regarded as an experimental, modernist novel; when it was published, nothing like it had been seen before. Joyce wrote the novel in a new “stream of consciousness” style, recording all the thoughts, observations, memories and feelings that go through his characters’ minds. Although the story is set in modern Dublin, it is based on Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce also wrote a book of short stories, called Dubliners (1914) about the lives of middle-class Irish people at the beginning of the 20th century. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Irish literature.

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was an English novelist and poet, and one of the 20th century’s most influential writers. He was born in a small mining town in Nottinghamshire, where his father worked as a coal miner and his mother as a lace-maker. Lawrence spent his early years writing poetry, but his third novel Sons and Lovers (1913) was his first big literary success. Inspired by his own life story, it was about a young man growing up in a poor mining town and his struggles to become an artist.

Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford, better known as Toni Morrison (1931–2019), was an American writer, famous for novels including The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987). She was born in Lorain, Ohio and studied literature at school and university. In the 1960s she worked as a fiction editor in New York, focusing especially on publishing work by African American authors.

​​​​​​​Morrison is known for writing about the experience of black people in America, and for making African American history and culture—especially that of black women—better-known through her fiction. Set just after the American Civil War, Beloved is about an African American woman who murders her own child in order to escape being recaptured into slavery.

In later life Toni Morrison became a professor at Princeton University, where she gave lectures and wrote essays, often about the way race was represented in literature and culture.

​​​​​​​In her writing Morrison explores the power of language in the way we record and remember history. She believed that storytelling was one of the most powerful things we can do to change the world we live in. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Morrison became the first black woman—and only the eighth woman since the prize was first awarded in 1901—to receive it.

George Orwell

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–50), an English novelist and journalist. His work focused on social injustice. He was also strongly opposed to totalitarianism (a type of government that prohibits opposition and exercises strict control over public and private life), which held sway in Stalinist Russia, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

​​​​​​​Orwell was born in Motihari, India, before moving as a child to Oxfordshire. After his school days at Eton, he served in the police in Burma, before returning to England. He volunteered to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, where he was injured by a sniper's bullet. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 46.

Orwell is best known for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Animal Farm tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel, hoping to create a free and equal society. The rebellion is betrayed and a dictator, a pig named Napoleon, takes over. The story reflects the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Nineteen Eighty-Four follows the fortunes of Winston, who lives in a future world of continuous war, all-seeing Big Brother (the head of government who may or may not exist) and the Thought Police, who persecute anyone given to independent thinking.

​​​​​​​Orwell also wrote non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), describing working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish writer famous for writing some of the first historical novels—novels based on real-life events from history. Scott was born in Edinburgh. As a child he survived polio, an illness which left him with difficulty walking, and he was sent to stay on his grandparents’ farm to recover. Here he would often listen to local people telling stories about their lives, and became very interested in Scottish history. He later collected together this oral (spoken) history in his first book, a collection of Scottish ballads (songs that tell a story) called The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders (1802).

Scott's first novel Waverley (1814) was immediately popular with readers. Set in 1745 at the time of the Jacobite rebellion, the story follows a young English gentleman named Edward Waverley as he moves to Scotland and finds his loyalties divided. Following the success of Waverley, Scott wrote several more books which became known as the “Waverley novels”, including The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) and Ivanhoe (1819), set in 12th-century England. For the rest of the 19th century, these were some of the most widely-read and popular novels in Europe. Scott was well-respected during his lifetime for the way he brought Scottish history and society to life in his novels.

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist best known today for writing the novel Frankenstein (1818). Her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, were well-known philosophers, famous for their work on feminism and anarchy. When she was 17, Mary fell in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and ran away with him to travel in Europe. Two years later, the couple spent a summer with friends near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where Shelley came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein. During their holiday, the group of friends were telling each other ghost stories, and Mary later developed hers into a novel. It tells the story of a scientist named Frankenstein who, as an experiment, creates a horrifying creature that can think for itself: Frankenstein’s “monster” (as it is now often called).

Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was a Russian novelist and poet. He grew up in the town of Rostov-on-Don. Although he wanted from a young age to be a writer, he studied mathematics at university. At the end of World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the Soviet Union for criticizing Stalin and sentenced to eight years of harsh labour in a prison camp. During his time there, he wrote lines of poetry on scraps of paper, memorized them and burned them before they could be discovered. He later recorded this experience in his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). When it was published, the account of prison labour in the Soviet Union shocked readers in the West as well as at home. This was because so little was known about the reality of life in the camps.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) was a Scottish travel writer and novelist. He is most famous for his adventure novel, Treasure Island (1883), a short novel called Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and a collection of poetry for children, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father, uncles and both grandfathers were all lighthouse engineers, but the young Stevenson wanted to be a writer.

Stevenson's first travel pieces were published in his 20s. After moving with his family to Bournemouth, England, he wrote Treasure Island, which tells the story about Jim Hawkins, an innkeeper's son, and his search for buried treasure stolen by the murderous pirate named Captain Flint. Characters such as the one-legged Long John Silver, whose parrot (also mockingly named Captain Flint) perched on his shoulder, would influence stories, films and illustrations about pirates for many years to come.

Stevenson suffered all his life from illnesses that affected his breathing, and he often travelled in search of somewhere to live that would be good for his health. In 1888 he moved with his family to Samoa in the South Pacific, where he lived for the last six years of his life. He died aged 44.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) was an English writer, best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1847–48). Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India, and sent to boarding school in England. As a young man he studied at Cambridge University and then moved to Paris, where he met and married Isabella Shaw. The couple returned to London, where Thackeray worked as a journalist and wrote travel books. In his thirties, he began writing “character sketches” for the satirical magazine Punch. These light-hearted observations of upper-middle-class life and English manners were instantly popular.

Vanity Fair is set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It weaves together the stories of three characters and their families, creating a portrait of English society in the early 19th century. It differed from other novels popular at the time, such as those by Charles Dickens, because it did not have one particular storyline. Instead it focused on the events that happened in the characters’ lives over time. Thackeray wrote several more novels, including The History of Pendennis (1848–50) and continued writing comic sketches for magazines, but Vanity Fair remained his masterpiece.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The English writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) is famous for writing the classic fantasy novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). Tolkien was born in South Africa but moved to Birmingham with his family when he was a child. As a young man, Tolkien studied Norse mythology and languages, and later taught them at Oxford University. This interest later led him to create his own myths and languages in his stories, and an invented world, “Middle Earth”, which would become the setting for his most famous novels.

The Hobbit began as a fantasy story Tolkien invented for his children. It tells the story of a short creature (a “hobbit”) named Bilbo Baggins and the adventures he has on his quest to find treasure guarded by a dragon named Smaug. When it was published as a book it became so popular that the publishers asked him to write a sequel to follow it.

The request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work, The Lord of the Rings, originally published in three parts. In this novel, the people of Middle Earth fight a war against the Dark Lord Sauron, and try to find and destroy a powerful ring. The course of the war is told through the eyes of its characters, especially the hobbits Frodo Baggins, Sam, Merry and Pippin. The Lord of the Rings has become one of the best-selling novels ever written.

Leo Tolstoy

Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) wrote the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) as well as novellas (short novels) such as The Death Of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Tolstoy was born near Moscow. Both his parents died when he was a young child. His first literary success came in his twenties, when he wrote a series of three novels (a trilogy) based on his childhood: Childhood, Boyhood and Youth. As a young man, Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War, an experience which horrified him and led him to reject violence and become a pacifist. A few years later he married his wife Sofya and moved back to live in his childhood home, where they had 13 children. Tolstoy now worked as a writer.

When he was 41, Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace was published. It tells the interconnected stories of five families at the time of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and has more than 500 characters. Following a few years later, Anna Karenina is about a married upper-class woman who falls in love with Vronsky, a young soldier. Tolstoy believed that good fiction was not purely for entertainment, but could teach us something about ourselves and how we should live. By focusing on his characters’ inner lives, their thoughts and feelings, his novels carry the message that we often never really know what goes on in the minds of others. He hoped that people would realise this and treat one another with kindness.

​​​​​​​As an elderly man, Tolstoy died from pneumonia on a cold winter’s night. Thousands of people from all over the world came to his funeral.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was the American writer of the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Growing up up in Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River, he became a steamboatman, piloting boats along the river. He later moved to Nevada and San Francisco, travelled to Europe and the Middle East before marrying Olivia Langdon. They settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and spending summers in Elmira, New York, and beginning his life as a writer.

Twain's boyhood experiences would later inspire him to write his novels, which tell the stories of Tom and Huck’s adventures along the Mississippi. Twain’s writing became popular because it reflected the way that Americans spoke, using slang and language that was common at the time. Today, his novels are considered classics for the way they describe 19th-century American life.

Virginia Woolf (born Adeline Virginia Stephen 1882–1941) was an English writer. She was born in London to a family who could afford to educate her well. As a young woman, she was greatly affected by the death of her parents. After her father’s death in 1905 she moved to an area of London called Bloomsbury and became friends with many other writers and artists who lived there, one of whom she married. Together they became known as "The Bloomsbury Group".

Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out was published in 1915. In 1925 she published Mrs Dalloway, a short novel that follows a group of dinner party guests over a single day. Like James Joyce, Woolf wrote in a "stream of consciousness" style, recording her characters' thoughts one after the other, making readers feel as if they were inside their minds. This technique, also used in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, became one of the main ideas of Modernism, a new literary movement of the time.

Émile Zola

Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French writer whose work had a strong influence on French literature. He began his career as a poet, then turned to making a living from journalism. During his life he was friends with many of France’s leading artists and playwrights. Zola is best-known for writing the 20-volume series of novels called Les Rougon-Macquart. He wrote one each year between the years 1871 and 1893. Featuring more than 300 characters, the novels follow the stories of two families during the Second French Empire (1851–71). Zola is considered to be one of the first European novelists to write in a naturalist style. Naturalistic writing presents people in a realistic way, without making their stories more dramatic or romantic than they actually are.