Browse the index

The nun who argued for women's right to learn — and was silenced for it.

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.

Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.

1,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.

Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.

Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.

Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.

Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.

The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.

Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.

El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.

Canto General and the love poems memorised across a continent.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.

Interior, philosophical fiction now a global cult.

The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.

Made the impossible ordinary and gave Latin America its own way of telling time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.

Omeros transplanted Homer to the Caribbean.

Theorised 'nation language' and Caribbean creolisation.

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

Made the short story carry the weight of novels.

A House for Mr Biswas and a contested postcolonial vision.

Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.

The Handmaid's Tale became the global shorthand for reproductive coercion.

Open Veins of Latin America reframed a hemisphere's economic history.

First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.

Indigenous rights advocate whose testimonio reached the world.