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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
12 figures
Li Bai
701 – 762Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.
Du Fu
712 – 770The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.
Sei Shōnagon
966 – 1017The Pillow Book invented the list-essay a millennium before the internet.
Murasaki Shikibu
973 – 1014Wrote the world's first psychological novel, a thousand years ago.
Omar Khayyam
1048 – 1131Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.
Hildegard of Bingen
1098 – 1179Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.
Rumi
1207 – 1273Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.
Dante Alighieri
1265 – 1321Made a dialect into a nation's language and mapped the moral universe.
Ibn Battuta
1304 – 1369Travelled some 120,000 km across the medieval world and wrote the Rihla.
Hafez
1325 – 1390Persia's beloved lyric poet; his divan is still consulted as an oracle.
Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 – 1400Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.
Sejong the Great
1397 – 1450Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.