Famous Writers & Authors

Welsh poet and writer celebrated for lyrical poems including “Do not go gentle into that good night” and for the radio play Under Milk Wood.

Blunt, adventurous and fiercely competitive, Hemingway turned war, sport and expatriate life into fiction written in a deliberately economical style. His public image as a man of action became almost as famous as his books.

American novelist, poet and essayist best known for the novella Legends of the Fall and a wide-ranging body of writing about rural life, food and the outdoors.

A prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut turned that experience and his distrust of war and technology into darkly funny novels that made him the counterculture's novelist. Beneath the jokes he wrote with plain-spoken decency.

Angelou turned a childhood shaped by hardship and racism into a body of work about resilience, dignity and identity. She became one of the most widely read and honoured American writers of her time.

American Beat poet, playwright and novelist whose first poetry reading was at San Francisco’s influential Six Gallery event in 1955.

Octavia E. Butler was an American science fiction writer and MacArthur Fellow known for Kindred and the Parable novels. She died on February 24, 2006.

Ray Bradbury was an American writer known for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. He died on June 5, 2012.

American poet associated with Black Mountain writing and postwar experimental poetry, known for concise, conversational verse and the collection For Love.

American poet, novelist and literary critic best known for All the King’s Men and as the only person to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry.

American poet and novelist known for Ariel, The Colossus and the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.

British novelist, poet, short-story writer and musicologist whose novel Lolly Willowes and decades of New Yorker stories established her distinctive literary career.

American-born British poet, critic, playwright and editor whose modernist works include The Waste Land and Four Quartets; he received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.

American playwright and screenwriter whose works include The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Night of the Iguana.

Morrison wrote about Black American life, history and memory in a poetic, demanding prose that widened what American fiction could hold. As an editor and teacher she also brought other Black writers into print and into the classroom.

Le Guin used invented worlds to examine power, identity, culture, and the choices communities make. Her fiction, poetry, and essays reached readers beyond the usual boundaries of genre.

American novelist and short-story writer whose fiction, often set in the invented Yoknapatawpha County, includes The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Light in August.

American novelist and visual artist, a leading Beat Generation writer best known for Naked Lunch and his experimental cut-up technique.

Walker’s fiction and poetry draw on Black life in the rural South, women’s relationships, and the ties between storytelling and social change.

American playwright and essayist whose works Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and All My Sons became central to twentieth-century theatre.

Russian-born American novelist and philosopher known for The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged and the development of her philosophical system, Objectivism.

American playwright and Nobel laureate whose psychologically searching dramas include Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh and The Hairy Ape.

Prague-born German-language novelist and short-story writer whose work, including The Metamorphosis and The Trial, became a defining influence on modern literature.

English novelist, essayist and critic whose political novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century.

Japanese novelist and translator whose surreal, internationally translated works include Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.

English philologist, university professor and author whose Middle-earth books, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, helped shape modern fantasy literature.

American novelist and Nobel laureate whose fiction explored California life, economic hardship and social change in works such as The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet and essayist known for The Handmaid’s Tale. She published the memoir Book of Lives in 2025.

Atlanta-born American novelist whose only published novel, Gone With the Wind, became a global bestseller and a landmark of popular fiction.

Welsh-born British novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter, best known to generations of readers for imaginative children’s books including Matilda and The BFG.

A former schoolteacher from Maine, King turned an early love of pulp horror into one of the largest bodies of popular fiction in American letters. He is disciplined, prolific and candid about his own failings.