Authors Index
Explore our complete library of authors ordered alphabetically. 204 authors found
A
Joe Abercrombie
Joseph Edward Abercrombie is an English author of epic fantasy books and a film editor. He is the author of The First Law and The Age of Madness trilogies, as well as other fantasy books in the same setting, and a trilogy of young adult novels. His novel Half a King won the 2015 Locus Award for best young adult book.
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe is often referred to as the "father of modern African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
Piers Anthony
Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob is an American author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is best known for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.
Jeffrey Archer
Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare is an English novelist and former politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Louth (Lincolnshire) from 1969 to 1974, but did not seek re-election after almost going bankrupt. Archer revived his fortunes as a novelist. His novel Kane and Abel (1979) remains one of the best-selling books in the world, with an estimated 34 million copies sold worldwide. Overall his books have sold more than 320 million copies worldwide.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. He wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction, including guides to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English writer known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment on the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century.
B
David Baldacci
David Baldacci is an American novelist. An attorney by education, Baldacci writes mainly suspense novels and legal thrillers. His novels are published in over 45 languages and published in over 80 countries, having sold over 130 million copies worldwide.
Iain M. Banks
Iain Menzies Banks was a Scottish author, writing mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio, and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo is an American fantasy author. She is best known for her young adult Grishaverse novels, which include the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows and King of Scars duologies. She also received acclaim for her paranormal fantasy adult debut, Ninth House. The Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows series have been adapted into Shadow and Bone by Netflix, and Ninth House will be adapted by Amazon Studios; Bardugo is an executive producer on both works.
Greg Bear
Gregory Dale Bear was an American science fiction writer. His work covered themes of conflict, consciousness, and accelerated evolution. The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars established his reputation. As time went on these works were rolled into lengthier trilogies and series. Along with Forge, popular series have included parallel universes in The Way and evolutionary themes in Darwin's Children.
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Mario Benedetti
Mario Benedetti Farrugia, was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet and an integral member of the Generación del 45. Despite publishing more than 80 books and being published in twenty languages, he was not well known in the English-speaking world. In the Spanish-speaking world, he is considered one of Latin America's most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century.
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel The Savage Detectives, and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages".
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magical realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Eleanor Zimmer Bradley was an American author of fantasy, historical fantasy, science fiction, and science fantasy novels and is best known for the Arthurian fiction novel The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series. She was noted for the female perspective in her writing, something before little-seen in sword and sorcery fantasy.
Charlotte Bronte
St. Georgen am Fillmannsbach is a municipality in the district of Braunau in the Austrian state of Upper Austria.
Emily Bronte
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet. A member of the Brontë literary family, she was the younger sister of Charlotte, Emily, and Branwell. Anne is known for her 1847 novel Agnes Grey and for her 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first feminist novels.
Dan Brown
Samone is a comune (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Turin in the Italian region Piedmont, located about 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of Turin. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 1,513 and an area of 2.5 square kilometres (0.97 mi2).
Pierce Brown
Pierce Brown is an American science fiction author who writes the Red Rising series, consisting of Red Rising (2014), Golden Son (2015), Morning Star (2016), Iron Gold (2018), Dark Age (2019), and Light Bringer (2023). He also has written a six-issue prequel comic book series, Red Rising: Sons of Ares, that was published in 2015.
James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is an American author, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won Edgar Awards for his novels Black Cherry Blues (1990), Cimarron Rose (1998), and Flags on the Bayou (2024). He has also been presented with the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin and then Tommy Lee Jones. His 1986 novel The Lost Get-back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Octavia Butler
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction and speculative fiction author who won several awards for her works, including Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
C
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, novelist, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history, and the first laureate in literature born in Africa. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel.
Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card is an American writer known best for his science fiction works. As of 2024, he is the only person to have won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in consecutive years, winning both awards for his novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986). A feature film adaptation of Ender's Game, which Card coproduced, was released in 2013. Card also wrote the Locus Fantasy Award-winning series The Tales of Alvin Maker (1987–2003). Card's fiction often features characters with exceptional gifts who make difficult choices with high stakes. Card has also written political, religious, and social commentary in his columns and other writing; he has provoked controversy and criticism for his public opposition to homosexuality.
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.
John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell, known by his pen name John le Carré, was an English author. Many of his espionage novels have been adapted for film or television. He has been described as a "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", and is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
Camilo José Cela
Camilo José Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquess of Iria Flavia was a Spanish novelist, poet, story writer and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement.
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best known for his two-part novel Don Quixote, a work considered to be the first modern novel. Don Quixote has been labelled by many well-known authors as the "best book of all time" and the "best and most central work in world literature".
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer. Widely considered one of the greatest writers of all time, his career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Lee Child
James Dover Grant, primarily known by his pen name Lee Child, is a British author who writes thriller novels and is best known for his Jack Reacher novel series. The books follow the adventures of a former American military policeman, Jack Reacher, who wanders the United States. His first novel, Killing Floor (1997), won the Anthony Award and the 1998 Barry Award for Best First Novel.
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan, Lady Mallowan, usually known by her first married name, Agatha Christie, was an English author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers, particularly in the mystery genre.
Liu Cixin
Liu Cixin is a Chinese computer engineer and science fiction writer. In English translations of his works, his name is given as Cixin Liu. He is sometimes called "Da Liu" by his fellow science fiction writers in China.
Tom Clancy
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was an American writer. He was best known for his techno-thrillers, which feature technical details in espionage and military science settings. Originally an insurance agent, Clancy published his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, in 1984. Eighteen novels followed between 1986 and 2013.
Cassandra Clare
Judith Lewis, better known by her pen name Cassandra Clare, is an American author of young adult fiction, best known for her bestselling series The Mortal Instruments.
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
Harlan Coben
Harlan Coben is an American writer of mystery and thrillers. The plots of his novels often involve the resurfacing of unresolved or misinterpreted events in the past, murders, or fatal accidents and have multiple twists. Twelve of his novels have been adapted for film and television.
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho de Souza is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He has been a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. His 1988 novel The Alchemist is an international best-seller.
Suzanne Collins
Nicollette Sheridan is a British-born American actress. She began her career as a fashion model before landing a role in the short-lived ABC primetime soap opera Paper Dolls in 1984, as well as starring in the romantic comedy film The Sure Thing (1985). She rose to prominence as Paige Matheson on the CBS primetime soap opera Knots Landing (1986–1993), for which she received two Soap Opera Digest Awards. Thereafter, Sheridan appeared in lead roles in numerous television films and miniseries, including Lucky Chances (1990), Virus (1995), and The People Next Door (1996). She also appeared in the feature films Noises Off (1992), Spy Hard (1996), Beverly Hills Ninja (1997), and Code Name: The Cleaner (2007).
Michael Connelly
Michael Joseph Connelly is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Connelly is the bestselling author of 38 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages. His first novel, The Black Echo, won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1997 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of Connelly's novel The Lincoln Lawyer starred Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson "Robin" Cook was a British Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 until his death in 2005 and served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 until 2001, when he was replaced by Jack Straw. He then served as Leader of the House of Commons from 2001 until 2003.
Patricia Cornwell
Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also accused Walter Sickert of carrying out the Jack the Ripper killings; Sickert is not considered a serious suspect by most who study the case, and strong evidence shows he spent most of 1888 outside the UK and was in France at the time of most of the Ripper murders. Her books have sold more than 120 million copies.
Michael Crichton
John Michael Crichton was an American author, screenwriter and filmmaker. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and over a dozen have been adapted into films. His literary works heavily feature technology and are usually within the science fiction, techno-thriller, and medical fiction genres. Crichton's novels often explore human technological advancement and attempted dominance over nature, both with frequently catastrophic results; many of his works are cautionary tales, especially regarding themes of biotechnology. Several of his stories center on themes of genetic modification, hybridization, paleontology and/or zoology. Many feature medical or scientific underpinnings, reflective of his own medical background.
Clive Cussler
Clive Eric Cussler was an American adventure novelist and underwater explorer. His thriller novels, many featuring the character Dirk Pitt, have been listed on The New York Times fiction best-seller list more than 20 times. Cussler was the founder and chairman of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), which has discovered more than 60 shipwreck sites and numerous other notable underwater wrecks. He was the sole author or main author of more than 80 books. He often placed himself into his books as himself.
D
Jeffery Deaver
Jeffery Deaver is an American mystery and crime writer. He has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a J.D. degree from Fordham University. He began his career as a journalist and later practiced law before embarking on a career as a novelist. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association and the Nero Award from The Wolfe Pack. He is also a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. His novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including The New York Times, The Times, Italy's Corriere della Sera, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times.
Nelson DeMille
Nelson Richard DeMille was an American author of action adventure and suspense novels. His novels include Plum Island, The Charm School, and The General's Daughter. DeMille also wrote under the pen names Jack Cannon, Kurt Ladner, Ellen Kay, and Brad Matthews.
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction short story writer and novelist. He wrote 45 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines. His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness. He is considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction.
Charles Dickens
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for the novels Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1886) and for the poetry collection A Child's Garden of Verses (1885).
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian philosopher, novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His Notes from Underground, a novella published in 1864, is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.
Arthur Conan Doyle
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio "Sandro" Pertini was an Italian politician, socialist, partisan and journalist who served as the president of Italy from 1978 to 1985.
E
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
David Eddings
David Carroll Eddings was an American fantasy writer. With his wife Leigh, he authored several best-selling epic fantasy novel series, including The Belgariad (1982–84), The Malloreon (1987–91), The Elenium (1989–91), The Tamuli (1992–94), and The Dreamers (2003–06).
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure of modernist poetry in the English language where he reinvigorated the art through his use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Steven Erikson
Steve Rune Lundin, known by his pseudonym Steven Erikson, is a Canadian novelist who was educated and trained as both an archaeologist and anthropologist.
Laura Esquivel
Laura Esquivel is a Mexican novelist best known for Like Water for Chocolate (1989), which was adapted into a film in 1992.
Janet Evanovich
Janet Evanovich is an American writer. She began her career writing short contemporary romance novels under the pen name Steffie Hall, but gained fame authoring a series of contemporary mysteries featuring Stephanie Plum, a former lingerie buyer from Trenton, New Jersey, who becomes a bounty hunter to make ends meet after losing her job. The novels in this series have been on The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller lists. Evanovich has had her last seventeen Plums debut at #1 on the NY Times Best Sellers list and eleven of them have hit #1 on USA Today Best-Selling Books list. She has over two hundred million books in print worldwide, and her books have been translated into over 40 languages.
F
Raymond E. Feist
Raymond Elias Feist is an American fantasy fiction author who wrote The Riftwar Cycle, a series of novels and short stories. His books have been translated into multiple languages and have sold over 15 million copies.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Professional wrestling, often referred to as pro wrestling, or simply, wrestling, is a form of athletic theater centered around mock combat, with the premise that its performers are competitive wrestlers. The legitimate sport of wrestling has never been popular enough in the United States to sustain a professional scene because the action is considered too slow-paced. In the late 19th century, wrestlers dealt with this by quietly fixing their matches so that they could display more entertaining action. Through improvisation and choreography, they could perform more spectacular moves that rarely occurred in a real wrestling match, and thus managed to draw sustainable audiences.
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. He is known especially for his debut novel Madame Bovary (1857), his Correspondence, and his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Guy de Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert.
Gillian Flynn
Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, and producer, best known for her thriller and mystery novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009), and Gone Girl (2012). Her works have been translated into 40 languages, and by 2016, Gone Girl had sold over 15 million copies worldwide.
Vince Flynn
Vincent Joseph Flynn was an American author of political thriller novels featuring the fictional assassin Mitch Rapp. He was a story consultant for the fifth season of the television series 24. He died of prostate cancer on June 19, 2013.
Ken Follett
Kenneth Martin Follett is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 195 million copies of his works.
Frederick Forsyth
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth was an English novelist and journalist. He was best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
Tana French
Tana French is an American-Irish writer and theatrical actress. She is a resident of Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel In the Woods (2007), a psychological mystery, won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for best first novel. The Independent has called her "the First Lady of Irish Crime".
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist, essayist and ambassador to France. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor (1999). He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
G
Diana Gabaldon
Diana J. Gabaldon is an American author and television writer. She is best known for the book series Outlander. Her books merge multiple genres, featuring elements of historical fiction, romance, mystery, adventure and science fiction/fantasy. A television adaptation of the Outlander novels premiered on Starz in 2014.
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic series The Sandman (1989–1996) and the novels Good Omens (1990), Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005), The Graveyard Book (2008) and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013). He co-created the TV adaptations of Good Omens and The Sandman.
Lisa Gardner
Lisa Gardner is a #1 New York Times bestselling American novelist. She is the author of more than 20 suspense novels, published in more than 30 countries. She began her career writing romantic suspense under the pseudonym Alicia Scott, before the publication of her breakout domestic thriller, The Perfect Husband, in 1997. TV and movie credits include At the Midnight House (CBS), Instinct to Kill, The Survivors Club (CBS), and Hide (TNT) as well as personal appearances on TruTV's Murder by the Book and CNN.
Khalil Gibran
Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist. He was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.
William Gibson
William Ford Gibson is an American and Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, a category from which he has repeatedly distanced himself. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept, along with his usage of the "matrix", in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
Terry Goodkind
Terry Lee Goodkind was an American writer. He was known for the epic fantasy series The Sword of Truth as well as the contemporary suspense novel The Law of Nines (2009), which has ties to his fantasy series. The Sword of Truth series sold 25 million copies worldwide and was translated into more than 20 languages. Additionally, it was adapted into a television series called Legend of the Seeker. Legend of the Seeker premiered on November 1, 2008 and ran for two seasons; the television series finished in May 2010.
Sue Grafton
Sue Taylor Grafton was an American author of detective novels. She is best known as the author of the "alphabet series" featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fictional city of Santa Teresa, California. The daughter of detective novelist C. W. Grafton, she said the strongest influence on her crime novels was author Ross Macdonald. Before her success with this series, she wrote screenplays for television movies.
Almudena Grandes
María de la Almudena Grandes Hernández was a Spanish writer. Author of 14 novels and three short-story collections, her work has been translated into twenty languages and frequently adapted to film. She won the National Literature Prize for Narrative and the Prix Méditerranée among other honors. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called her "one of the most important writers of our time."
John Green
John Michael Green is an American author and YouTuber. His books have more than 50 million copies in print worldwide, including The Fault in Our Stars (2012), which is one of the best-selling books of all time. Green's rapid rise to fame and idiosyncratic voice are credited with creating a major shift in the young adult fiction market. Green is also well known for his work in online video, most notably his YouTube ventures with his younger brother Hank Green.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author. She is best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Her work was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and more than a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said that she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".
H
Peter F. Hamilton
Peter F. Hamilton is a British author. He is known for writing science fiction space opera.
Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah is an American writer. Her most notable works include Winter Garden, The Nightingale, Firefly Lane, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. In addition to this, The Nightingale is in the process of being turned into a film adaptation, which is set to be released in early 2027. Hannah's most recent work, The Women, was published in 2024. It is set in the United States in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Frank Herbert
Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French statesman who served as First Minister of State from 1661 until his death in 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His lasting impact on the organization of the country's politics and markets, known as Colbertism, a doctrine often characterized as a variant of mercantilism, earned him the nickname le Grand Colbert.
Robin Hobb
Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, known by her pen names Robin Hobb and Megan Lindholm, is an American writer of speculative fiction. As Hobb, she is best known for her fantasy novels set in the Realm of the Elderlings, which comprise the Farseer, Liveship Traders and Tawny Man trilogies, the Rain Wild Chronicles, and the Fitz and the Fool trilogy. Lindholm's writing includes the urban fantasy novel Wizard of the Pigeons and science fiction short stories, among other works. As of 2018, her fiction has been translated into 22 languages and sold more than 4 million copies.
Colleen Hoover
Margaret Colleen Hoover is an American author who primarily writes novels in the romance and young adult fiction genres. She is best known for her 2016 novel It Ends with Us. Many of her works were self-published before they were picked up by a publishing house. As of October 2022, Hoover had sold approximately 20 million books. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Hugh Howey
Hugh C. Howey is an American writer. He is the author of the science fiction series Silo, part of which he published independently through Amazon.com's Kindle Direct Publishing system. Although he has since signed distribution deals with large publishing houses around the world, he has continued to maintain the publishing rights and direct control over all e-book publishing.
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives and poems.
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Kazuo Ishiguro
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded several major literary prizes, including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
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N.K. Jemisin
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim.
Robert Jordan
James Oliver Rigney Jr., known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy. He is best known as the author of The Wheel of Time series, which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel. The series is among the highest-selling book series of all time, with 90 million copies sold. In his earlier career he became one of several writers to produce original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best written by authors other than the character's creator, Robert E. Howard. Jordan was the most well-known of several pen names he used, adopting different monikers for different genres.
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist movement and is regarded among the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include two books of poetry, a play, correspondence, and occasional journalism.
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Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). He is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms, which frequently incorporated comedic elements alongside the darker themes of his longer works. His work has widely influenced artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, literary historians, religious scholars, and cultural theorists.
Yasunari Kawabata
Yasunari/Kōsei Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author. Dubbed the "King of Horror", he is widely known for his horror fiction and has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery. He has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections.
Dean Koontz
Dean Ray Koontz is an American author. His novels are billed as suspense thrillers, but frequently incorporate elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and satire. Many of his books have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with fourteen hardcovers and sixteen paperbacks reaching the number-one position. Koontz wrote under a number of pen names earlier in his career, including "David Axton", "Deanna Dwyer", "K. R. Dwyer", "Leigh Nichols" and "Brian Coffey". He has published over 105 novels and a number of novellas and collections of short stories, and has sold over 500 million copies of his work. He has been acknowledged as “America’s most popular suspense novelist” by Rolling Stone and as one of today’s most celebrated and successful writers.
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Stieg Larsson
Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson was a Swedish writer, journalist, and far-left activist. He is best known for writing the first trilogy in the Millennium series of crime novels, which was published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the United States. Larsson had conceived of ten books in the series; the publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to write the next trilogy, and Karin Smirnoff to write the third trilogy in the series, which has eight novels as of December 2025. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman is an American journalist and author of over 20 detective fiction novels. Her novels have won multiple awards, including an Agatha Award, seven Anthony Awards, two Barry Awards, an Edgar Award, a Gumshoe Award, a Macavity Award, a Nero Award, two Shamus Awards, and two Strand Critics Award.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa was a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist, and politician. Vargas Llosa was one of the most significant Latin American novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Federico Garcia Lorca
Catania is the second-largest municipality in Sicily, after Palermo, both by area and by population. Despite being the second city of the island, Catania is the centre of the most densely populated Sicilian conurbation, which is among the largest in Italy. It has important road and rail transport infrastructures, and hosts the main airport of Sicily. The city is located on Sicily's east coast, facing the Ionian Sea at the base of the active volcano Mount Etna. It is the capital of the 58-municipality province known as the Metropolitan City of Catania, which is the seventh-largest metropolitan area in Italy. The population of the city proper is 297,517, while the population of the metropolitan city is 1,068,563.
H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, but his legacy is also apparent in terms like "Lovecraftian horror" and an enduring fandom.
Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogy series. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 300 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.
Scott Lynch
Scott Lynch is an American fantasy author, best known for the Gentleman Bastard Sequence series of novels. His first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, was purchased by Orion Books in August 2004 and published in June 2006 under the Gollancz imprint in the United Kingdom and under the Bantam imprint in the United States. The next two novels in the series, Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves, were published in 2007 and 2013, respectively. The planned fourth of seven books in the series will be The Thorn of Emberlain.
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Sarah J. Maas
Sarah Janet Maas is an American fantasy author known for her series Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Crescent City. As of 2024, she has sold more than 75 million copies of her books and her work has been translated into 40 languages.
Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described him as a writer "who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Egyptian narrative art that applies to all mankind".
Javier Marías
Javier Marías Franco was a Spanish author, translator, and columnist. Marías published fifteen novels, including A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, widely regarded as his greatest achievement. In addition to his novels, he also published three collections of short stories and various essays. As one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, his books have been translated into forty-six languages and sold close to nine million copies internationally. He received several awards for his work, such as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1995), the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (1997), the International Nonino Prize (2011), and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2011).
Gabriel García Márquez
Ground spiders comprise Gnaphosidae, the seventh largest spider family with about 2,500 described species in over 100 genera distributed worldwide. There are 105 species known to central Europe, and common genera include Gnaphosa, Drassodes, Micaria, Cesonia, Zelotes and many others. They are closely related to Clubionidae. At present, no ground spiders are known to be seriously venomous to humans.
George R.R. Martin
George Raymond Richard Martin, also known by the initials G.R.R.M., is an American author, screenwriter, and television producer. Martin is best known as the author of the epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted by HBO into the Primetime Emmy Award–winning television series Game of Thrones (2011–2019) and its prequel series House of the Dragon (2022–present). Martin also wrote a related series of novellas, Tales of Dunk and Egg, which have been adapted by HBO as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026–present). Outside of A Song of Ice and Fire and its related media, Martin helped create the Wild Cards anthology series and contributed worldbuilding for the video game Elden Ring (2022).
Guy de Maupassant
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a 19th-century French author, celebrated as a master of the short story, as well as a representative of the naturalist school, depicting human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.
Anne McCaffrey
Anne Inez McCaffrey was an American writer known for the Dragonriders of Pern science fiction series. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award for fiction and the first to win a Nebula Award. Her 1978 novel The White Dragon became one of the first science-fiction books to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Val McDermid
Valarie McDermid is a Scottish crime writer of over 30 novels. Her work is considered part of a sub-genre known as Tartan Noir, and is known for uncompromising depictions of violence. Her books have received numerous awards, including the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award.
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him at number 35 on its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945", and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 out of "the 100 most powerful people in British culture".
Eduardo Mendoza
Eduardo Mendoza may refer to:Eduardo Mendoza Arellano, Mexican congressman Eduardo Mendoza Garriga, Spanish novelist Eduardo Mendoza Goiticoa (1917–2009), Venezuelan scientific researcher, politician, and statesman Eduardo Mendoza (footballer), Mexican footballer
China Miéville
China Tom Miéville is a British speculative fiction writer and literary critic. He often describes his work as "weird fiction", and is allied to the loosely associated movement of writers called New Weird.
Yukio Mishima
Kimitake Hiraoka, known by his pen name Yukio Mishima, was a Japanese writer, playwright, actor, martial artist, model, and the leader of an attempted coup d'état that culminated in his seppuku.
Gabriela Mistral
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, journalist and educator. She read widely in theosophy, became a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order in 1925, but rarely attended mass. She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. She also wrote an immense body of prose, about 800 articles that circulated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, on a range of topics: geography, education, profiles of her fellow writers, politics, and more. Her image is featured on the 5,000 Chilean peso banknote.
Antonio Muñoz Molina
Antonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 8 June 1995. He received the 1991 Premio Planeta, the 2013 Jerusalem Prize, and the 2013 Prince of Asturias Award for literature.
Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, originally of science fiction and fantasy, who has published many well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Richard Morgan
Richard Morgan may refer to:Sir Richard Morgan, MP for Gloucester, 1545–53; Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1553–55 Richard Morgan (MP), Member of Parliament (MP) for Montgomery Boroughs Richard Hillebrand Morgan, Sri Lankan Burgher lawyer Richard Williams Morgan, Welsh clergyman and author Richard Morgan, Ceylonese Chief Justice Dick Thompson Morgan (1853–1920), U.S. Representative from Oklahoma Richard Morgan (actor) (1958–2006), Australian actor Richie Morgan, Welsh footballer and manager Richard K. Morgan, British science fiction author Richard Morgan (cricketer), New Zealand cricketer Richard E. Morgan (1937–2014), American conservative author of non-fiction Richard T. Morgan (1952–2018), American politician from North Carolina Richard Morgan, winning driver of the Formula Ford Festival auto race in 1974
Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty is an Australian author. She began her career in advertising and marketing before publishing her first novel, Three Wishes, in 2003. She has since written a total of ten novels, which have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Three of Moriarty's novels—Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, and Apples Never Fall—have been adapted into television series, and she was the first Australian author to debut in top position on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Toni Morrison
Leonardo "Leo" Neoren Franco is an Argentine former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper.
Walter Mosley
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hardboiled detective Easy Rawlins, a private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
Jojo Moyes
Pauline Sara Jo Moyes, known professionally as Jojo Moyes, is an English journalist and, since 2002, an award-winning romance novelist, number-one New York Times best selling author and screenwriter. She is one of only a few authors to have twice won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association and her works have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
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Julia Navarro
Centre d'Esports Sabadell Futbol Club, S.A.D. is one of Spain's most historical football Clubs. Based in Sabadell and founded in 1903, its first men's team plays in the Primera Federación – Group 2. Its first women's team is active in the Preferent catalana, the fifth level, and its first U19 men's team participates in Division de Honor, Spain's top tier. The club has over 50 teams in its prestigious youth academy. The club holds home games at the Estadi de la Nova Creu Alta, which hosted football games at Barcelona Olympics.
Pablo Neruda
The Totonacan languages are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 290,000 Totonac and Tepehua people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. At the time of the Spanish conquest Totonacan languages were spoken all along the gulf coast of Mexico. During the colonial period, Totonacan languages were occasionally written and at least one grammar was produced. In the 20th century the number of speakers of most varieties have dwindled as indigenous identity increasingly became stigmatized encouraging speakers to adopt Spanish as their main language.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher and writer who started his career as a classical philologist and turned to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, at age 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. Plagued by health problems for most of his life, he resigned from the university in 1879. He afterward lived as an independent writer, spending much of his life in relative solitude and financial insecurity while moving between Switzerland, Italy, and southern France in search of climates that might alleviate his condition, and in the following decade, he completed much of his core writing. In 1889, aged 44, he suffered a mental breakdown and thereafter a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and vascular dementia, living his remaining 11 years under the care of his family until his death. His works and his philosophy have fostered not only extensive scholarship but also much popular interest.
Naomi Novik
Naomi Novik is an American author of speculative fiction. She is known for the Temeraire series (2006–2016), an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, and her Scholomance fantasy series (2020–2022). Her standalone fantasy novels Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) were inspired by Polish folklore and the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale respectively. Novik has won many awards for her work, including the Alex, Audie, British Fantasy, Locus, Mythopoeic and Nebula Awards.
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George Orwell
Ivan IV Vasilyevich, commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia from 1533 to 1547, and the first Tsar and Grand Prince of all Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584. Ivan's reign was characterised by Russia's transformation from a medieval state to a fledgling empire, but at an immense cost to its people and long-term economy.
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Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
Sara Paretsky
Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski.
James Patterson
James Brendan Patterson is an American author. Among his works are the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women's Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch & Wizard, Private and Middle School series, as well as many stand-alone thrillers, non-fiction, and romance novels. Patterson's books have sold more than 425 million copies, and he was the first person to sell one million e-books. In 2016, Patterson topped Forbes's list of highest-paid authors for the third consecutive year, with an income of $95 million. His total income over a decade is estimated at $700 million.
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican philosopher, poet, and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
George Pelecanos
George P. Pelecanos is an American author, producer, and television writer. Many of his 20 books are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. On television, he frequently collaborates with David Simon, writing multiple episodes of Simon's HBO series The Wire and Treme, and is also the co-creator of the HBO series The Deuce and We Own This City.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for RTVE for 21 years (1973–1994). His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was published in 1986.
Sylvia Plath
Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as one of the central figures of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States and of early American literature. Poe was one of the country's first successful practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered to be one of the pioneers of the detective fiction genre. In addition, he is credited with contributing significantly to the emergence of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living exclusively through writing, which resulted in a financially difficult life and career.
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983 and 2015, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990), which he co-wrote with Neil Gaiman.
Marcel Proust
Taillet is a commune in the Pyrénées-Orientales department in southern France.
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Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid is an American author best known for her novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & the Six, One True Loves, Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto Is Back, and Atmosphere. She has nine #1 New York Times bestselling novels.
Alastair Reynolds
Alastair Preston Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera.
Rick Riordan
Rodolfo "Rudy" Fernández Farrés is a Spanish former professional basketball player who spent the majority of his career for Real Madrid of the Spanish Liga ACB and the EuroLeague. He is a 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m) tall swingman. He is a three-time All-EuroLeague Team selection and won the EuroLeague title in 2015, 2018 and 2023. During his stint in the National Basketball Association (NBA), he was an NBA All-Rookie Second Team member.
Nora Roberts
Nora Roberts is an American author of over 225 novels, known for romance published under her own name. She also writes police procedurals which have elements of science fiction under the name J. D. Robb, and has published as Jill March and Sarah Hardesty.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer best known for his Mars trilogy of novels. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes, featuring scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic magazine has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to The New Yorker magazine, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Patrick Rothfuss
Patrick James Rothfuss is an American author. He is best known for his highly acclaimed series The Kingkiller Chronicle, beginning with Rothfuss' debut novel, The Name of the Wind (2007), which won several awards, and continuing in the sequel, The Wise Man's Fear (2011), which topped The New York Times Best Seller list.
Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell is an American author known for young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her young adult novels Eleanor & Park (2012), Fangirl (2013), and Carry On (2015) have been subjects of critical acclaim.
J.K. Rowling
Joanne Rowling, better known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author, philanthropist, producer, and screenwriter. She is best known for writing Harry Potter, a seven-volume series about a young wizard. Published from 1997 to 2007, the fantasy novels are the best-selling book series in history, with over 600 million copies sold. They have been translated into 84 languages and have spawned a global media franchise including films and video games. She writes Cormoran Strike, an ongoing crime fiction series, under the alias Robert Galbraith.
Juan Rulfo
Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno, best known as Juan Rulfo, was a Mexican writer, screenwriter, and photographer. He is best known for two literary works, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, and the collection of short stories El Llano en llamas. In spite of Rulfo's slim literary production, he is considered one of the greatest Mexican and Latin American writers of the twentieth century who has influenced many subsequent writers including the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magical realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions that marked the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
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Ernesto Sabato
Argentine writer and essayist, author of The Tunnel and On Heroes and Tombs.
J.D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.
Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Winn Sanderson is an American author of high fantasy, science fiction, and young adult books. His best known novels include the Mistborn series and The Stormlight Archive, which are set in the Cosmere fictional universe. Outside of the Cosmere, he has written several young adult and juvenile series including The Reckoners, the Skyward series, and the Alcatraz series. He is also known for finishing author Robert Jordan's high fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Sanderson has created two graphic novels, White Sand and Dark One.
José Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant."
V.E. Schwab
Victoria Elizabeth Schwab is an American writer. She is known for the 2013 novel Vicious, the Shades of Magic series, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which was nominated for the 2020 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. She publishes children's and young adult fiction books under the name Victoria Schwab. She is the creator of the supernatural teen drama series First Kill, based on her short story of the same name originally published in the 2020 anthology Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" or simply "the Bard". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Dan Simmons
Daniel Joseph Simmons was an American science fiction and horror writer. He was the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works that span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons's genre-intermingling Song of Kali (1985) won the World Fantasy Award. He also wrote mysteries and thrillers, some of which feature the continuing character Joe Kurtz.
Karin Slaughter
Karin Slaughter is an American crime writer. She is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty-five novels, including the Edgar-nominated Cop Town and standalone novels Pretty Girls and False Witness. An international bestseller, Slaughter is published in 120 countries with more than 40 million copies sold across the globe.
Wilbur Smith
Wilbur Addison Smith was a Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, was an immediate best-seller and won a number of awards. Smith became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Wole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, playwright, and poet. He has written three novels, ten collections of short stories, seven poetry collections, twenty-five plays and five memoirs. He also wrote two translated works and many articles and short stories for many newspapers and periodicals. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "wide cultural perspective and poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence".
Nicholas Sparks
Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter, and film producer. He has published 24 novels, 16 of which are New York Times bestsellers, and two works of nonfiction, with over 130 million copies sold worldwide in more than 50 languages. Among his works are The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, and Message in a Bottle all of which, along with eight other books, have been adapted as feature films.
Danielle Steel
Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling living author and the fourth-best-selling fiction author of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. As of 2024, she has written 210 books, including over 182 novels.
Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. A self-proclaimed egotist, the neologism for the same characteristic in his characters was "Beylism".
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and baroque.
Bram Stoker
Abraham Stoker was an Irish writer, barrister, and theatre manager. He was the author of Dracula (1897) and the creator of the fictional character Count Dracula. The novel and its antagonist are milestones in the fields of Gothic and vampire literature.
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Donna Tartt
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist. She wrote the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2019 film of the same name. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a Kenyan author and academic, who has been described as East Africa's leading novelist and an important figure in modern African literature.
Brad Thor
Bradley George Thor Jr. is an American thriller novelist. He is the author of The Lions of Lucerne, The First Commandment, The Last Patriot, and other novels. Thor's novels have been published in countries around the world. He also contributed a short story entitled "The Athens Solution" to the James Patterson-edited anthology, Thriller. Thor also makes frequent appearances on Fox News and The Blaze.
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
J.R.R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55).
Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator and popularizer of Russian literature in the West.
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He has been praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature". Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel". He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. The novelist Ernest Hemingway claimed that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
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Jules Verne
Emperor Shun of Han was an emperor of the Chinese Han dynasty and the eighth emperor of the Eastern Han. He reigned from December 125 to September 144.
Vernor Vinge
Vernor Steffen Vinge was an American science fiction author and professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He was the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), and Rainbows End (2006), and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2001) and The Cookie Monster (2004).
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David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American writer and professor who published novels, short stories, and essays. He is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine named one of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. In 2008, David Ulin wrote for the Los Angeles Times that Wallace was "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Andy Weir
Andy Weir is an American novelist. His 2011 novel The Martian was adapted into the 2015 film of the same name directed by Ridley Scott. He received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. His 2021 novel Project Hail Mary was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and has also been adapted into a film, released in March 2026.
Oscar Wilde
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He is best known for his four novels and fifty-six short stories about the fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson, which are milestones in crime fiction, and for his first work featuring Professor Challenger, The Lost World (1912), which gave its name to a subgenre of speculative fiction. He was a prolific writer who produced over 200 stories and articles, four volumes of poetry, and a number of works for the stage. He was knighted by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours.
Tad Williams
Robert Paul "Tad" Williams is an American fantasy and science fiction writer. He is the author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, Shadowmarch series, and The Bobby Dollar series, as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song and The War of the Flowers. Most recently, Williams published The Last King of Osten Ard series, with its final novel The Navigator's Children being published in 2024. More than 17 million copies of Williams' works have been sold.
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.
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Mo Yan
Mo Yan, born Guan Moye, is a Chinese writer. He gained attention for his 1984 novella, A Transparent Radish, and rose to international fame for his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, the first two parts of which were adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film Red Sorghum (1988). In 2012, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".
Banana Yoshimoto
Banana Yoshimoto is the pen name of Japanese writer Mahoko Yoshimoto . From 2002 to 2015, she wrote her name in hiragana.
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Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sancho Garcés III, also known as Sancho the Great, was the King of Pamplona from 1004 until his death in 1035. He also ruled the County of Aragon and by marriage the counties of Castile, Álava and Monzón. He later added the counties of Sobrarbe (1015), Ribagorza (1018) and Cea (1030), and would intervene in the Kingdom of León, taking its eponymous capital city in 1034.
Roger Zelazny
Roger Joseph Zelazny was an American fantasy and science fiction writer known for his short stories and novels focusing on mythology and various religions, best known for The Chronicles of Amber series. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times, including two Hugos for novels: the serialized novel ...And Call Me Conrad (1965), subsequently published under the title This Immortal (1966) and the novel Lord of Light (1967).
