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Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.

Sanskrit's supreme dramatist; Shakuntala reached Goethe.

Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.

The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.

The Pillow Book invented the list-essay a millennium before the internet.

Wrote the world's first psychological novel, a thousand years ago.

Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.

Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.

Persia's beloved lyric poet; his divan is still consulted as an oracle.

Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.

Perfected haiku and the travel journal in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.

Rebuilt Hebrew as a modern literary language.

First Japanese literature laureate; Snow Country and The Old Capital.

Composed the Buru Quartet orally in a prison camp.

Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.

Novelist of Istanbul's melancholy and East–West fracture.

Hallucinatory realism of rural Shandong across China's violent century.

Confronts historical trauma and bodily fragility; The Vegetarian, Human Acts.

Shot for going to school; now the youngest Nobel laureate in history.