Literature & Letters

Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.

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Curated highlights

Laureates and fully researched profiles first, in order of birth.

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

Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.

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

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

Wrote the refugee not as a statistic but as a person with a prior life.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Novelists, poets and dramatists whose books changed the languages and politics of their countries.

Thinkers whose arguments about knowledge, ethics and power still govern how courts, schools and states reason.

The New Thought authors behind modern self-help, prosperity teaching and the mind-body movement.

Theologians and religious reformers whose writings organised faiths, empires and dissent.

Historians who established how the past is recorded, argued over and used in the present.

Scholars of language structure, decipherment and the cognitive roots of grammar.