Hanan Al-Shaykh
Hanan Al-Shaykh (Arabic: حنان الشيخ) is a Lebanese journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Born into a conservative Shia' Muslim family, she received her primary education in Beirut and later she attended the American College for Girls in Cairo. She began her journalism career in Egypt before returning to Lebanon. Her short stories and novels feature primarily female characters in the face of conservative religious traditions set against the backdrop of political tensions and instability of the Lebanese civil war.
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Suad Amiry
Suad Amiry (Arabic: سعاد العامري) is a Palestinian writer and architect has been living in Ramallah since 1981.
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Born in Damascus, Amiry grew up between Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. She studied architecture at the American University of Beirut, Michigan, US, and in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Amiry is author of the well-known book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law which has been translated into 17 languages and was awarded the prestigious 2004 Viareggio Prize.
She is the founder and Director of the Riwaq: Centre for Architectural Conservation. Amiry is the vice-president of the Board of Trustees of Birzeit University.
Her book Menopausal Palestine: Women at the Edge was published in India by Women Unlimited (2010) Her latest book Nothing to Lose But yo -
Tayeb Salih
The Sudanese writer al-Tayyib Salih (Arabic: الطيب صالح)has been described as the "genius of the modern Arabic novel." He has lived abroad for most of his life, yet his fiction is firmly rooted in the village in which he spent his early years. His most well-known work is the modern classic Mawsim al-hijra ila’l-shamal (1967; Season of Migration to the North), which received great critical attention and brought new vitality to the Arab novel.
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Salih has not been a prolific writer; his early work, including Season of Migration to the North, remains the best of his oeuvre. He has received critical acclaim in both the west and the east. In Sudan he is without rival, and his writing has played a considerable part in drawing attention to Sudanese l -
Kendra James
Kendra James was a founding editor at Shondaland.com where she wrote and edited work for two years. She has been heard and seen on NPR and podcasts including "Thirst Aid Kit," "Three Swings,” “Star Trek: The Pod Directive,” “The Canon," and "Al Jazeera." Her writing has been published widely from Elle, Marie Claire, Women's Health Magazine, Lenny, The Verge, Harpers, Catapult, and The Toast, among others.
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Nawal El Saadawi
Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic: نوال السعداوي) was born in 1931, in a small village outside Cairo. Unusually, she and her brothers and sisters were educated together, and she graduated from the University of Cairo Medical School in 1955, specializing in psychiatry. For two years, she practiced as a medical doctor, both at the university and in her native Tahla.
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From 1963 until 1972, Saadawi worked as Director General for Public Health Education for the Egyptian government. During this time, she also studied at Columbia University in New York, where she received her Master of Public Health degree in 1966. Her first novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor was published in Cairo in 1958. In 1972, however, she lost her job in the Egyptian government as a resu -
Aimé Césaire
Martinique-born poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Fernand Césaire contributed to the development of the concept of negritude; his primarily surrealist works include The Miracle Weapons (1946) and A Tempest (1969).
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A francophone author of African descent. His books of include Lost Body, with illustrations by Pablo Picasso, Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, and Return to My Native Land. He is also the author of Discourse on Colonialism, a book of essays which has become a classic text of French political literature and helped establish the literary and ideological movement Negritude, a term Césaire defined as “the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our h -
Arthur Koestler
Darkness at Noon (1940), novel of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler, portrays his disillusionment with Communism; his nonfiction works include The Sleepwalkers (1959) and The Ghost in the Machine (1967).
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Arthur Koestler CBE [*Kösztler Artúr] was a prolific writer of essays, novels and autobiographies.
He was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-Communist novel, Darkness at Noon, which propelled him to instant international fame.
Over the next forty-three years he espoused ma -
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee," the state of his father's birth.
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Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, after years of obscurity, at age 33 he became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. This play closely reflected his own unhappy family background. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, he attempted a new style that did not ap -
Μαρία Ιορδανίδου
Maria Iordanidou
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Γεννήθηκε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη το 1897 και έζησε τα παιδικά της χρόνια στον Πειραιά και το Βατούμ της Ρωσίας. Φοίτησε σε ρωσικό γυμνάσιο, στη Σταυρούπολη, όπου τη βρήκε η Οκτωβριανή Επανάσταση. Το 1919 γύρισε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη και λίγο αργότερα πήγε στην Αλεξάνδρεια, όπου παντρεύτηκε τον Ιορδάνη Ιορδανίδη. Το 1923 επέστρεψαν μαζί στην Αθήνα, αλλά σύντομα ο Ιορδανίδης έφυγε.
Εξαιτίας των συνθηκών της ζωής της, η Ιορδανίδου απέκτησε μεγάλη γλωσσομάθεια και εργάστηκε ως ιδιωτική υπάλληλος. Έγινε γνωστή στο λογοτεχνικό χώρο με το έργο Λωξάντρα, που έγραψε σε ηλικία 65 χρονών, το 1962, και γνώρισε πολλές επανεκδόσεις. Η Λωξάντρα περιγράφει με μεγάλη ζωντάνια και χιούμορ τα έθιμα και τη ζωή των Ελλήνων της Πόλης και βασίζεται -
Charlotte Wood
Charlotte Wood is the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her new novel is The Weekend.
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Her previous novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the 2016 Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year, was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction.
Her non-fiction works include The Writer’s Room, a collection of interviews with authors about the creative process, and Love & Hunger, a book about cooking. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper among other publications. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant services to literature, and was named one of the Aus -
Itamar Vieira Junior
Itamar Vieira Junior (Salvador, 1979) é um escritor brasileiro. Formou-se em Geografia na Universidade Federal da Bahia, onde também concluiu mestrado. É doutor em Estudos Étnicos e Africanos pela Universidade Federal da Bahia com estudo sobre a formação de comunidades quilombolas no interior do Nordeste brasileiro. Em 2018, venceu o Prémio LeYa, com o romance “Torto Arado”.
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Ghassan Kanafani
Ghassan Kanafani (Arabic: غسان كنفاني)
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Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, fiction writer, and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Kanafani died at the age of 36, assassinated by car bomb in Beirut, By the Israeli Mossad
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in Acre in Palestine (then under the British mandate) in 1936. His father was a lawyer, and sent Ghassan to a French missionary school in Jaffa. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Kanafani and his family fled to Lebanon, but soon moved on to Damascus, Syria, to live there as Palestinian refugees.
After studying Arabic literature at the University of Damascus, Kanafani became a teacher at the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. There, he began wri -
Basem Khandaqji
Basem Khandaqji (Arabic: باسم خندقجي) is a Palestinian writer, journalist, and prisoner, was born in 1983. His novel A Mask, the Color of the Sky won the Arabic Booker Prize in 2024.
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He has studied at An-Najah National University and Al-Quds University. He was arrested by the Israeli defence forces on November 2, 2004, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He has published several novels, poems, and studies from prison.
باسم خندقجي، كاتب وشاعر فلسطيني من مواليد 1983. درس في جامعة النجاح الوطنية في قسم الصحافة والإعلام. اعتُقِل من قبل قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلية في 2004، وحكم عليه بالسجن مدى الحياة.
له عدة روايات ودواوين شعر كتبها من داخل السجن.
فازت روايته «قناع بلون السماء» بالجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية 2024. -
Μαρία Ιορδανίδου
Maria Iordanidou
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Γεννήθηκε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη το 1897 και έζησε τα παιδικά της χρόνια στον Πειραιά και το Βατούμ της Ρωσίας. Φοίτησε σε ρωσικό γυμνάσιο, στη Σταυρούπολη, όπου τη βρήκε η Οκτωβριανή Επανάσταση. Το 1919 γύρισε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη και λίγο αργότερα πήγε στην Αλεξάνδρεια, όπου παντρεύτηκε τον Ιορδάνη Ιορδανίδη. Το 1923 επέστρεψαν μαζί στην Αθήνα, αλλά σύντομα ο Ιορδανίδης έφυγε.
Εξαιτίας των συνθηκών της ζωής της, η Ιορδανίδου απέκτησε μεγάλη γλωσσομάθεια και εργάστηκε ως ιδιωτική υπάλληλος. Έγινε γνωστή στο λογοτεχνικό χώρο με το έργο Λωξάντρα, που έγραψε σε ηλικία 65 χρονών, το 1962, και γνώρισε πολλές επανεκδόσεις. Η Λωξάντρα περιγράφει με μεγάλη ζωντάνια και χιούμορ τα έθιμα και τη ζωή των Ελλήνων της Πόλης και βασίζεται -
Alaa Al Aswany
علاء الأسواني
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Alaa al-Aswany (Arabic: علاء الأسواني), Egyptian Arabic (Masri) "علاء الاسوانى" (born 1957) is an Egyptian writer, and a founding member of the political movement Kefaya.
Trained as a dentist in Egypt and Chicago, it took him 9 years to earn his degree from Chicago National University where he spent 17 years in his life, al-Aswany has contributed numerous articles to Egyptian newspapers on literature, politics, and social issues. His second novel, The Yacoubian Building, an ironic depiction of modern Egyptian society, has been widely read in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. It has been translated into English, Danish, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Greek and Dutch, and was adapted into a film (2006) and a television series (2 -
Μαρία Ιορδανίδου
Maria Iordanidou
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Γεννήθηκε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη το 1897 και έζησε τα παιδικά της χρόνια στον Πειραιά και το Βατούμ της Ρωσίας. Φοίτησε σε ρωσικό γυμνάσιο, στη Σταυρούπολη, όπου τη βρήκε η Οκτωβριανή Επανάσταση. Το 1919 γύρισε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη και λίγο αργότερα πήγε στην Αλεξάνδρεια, όπου παντρεύτηκε τον Ιορδάνη Ιορδανίδη. Το 1923 επέστρεψαν μαζί στην Αθήνα, αλλά σύντομα ο Ιορδανίδης έφυγε.
Εξαιτίας των συνθηκών της ζωής της, η Ιορδανίδου απέκτησε μεγάλη γλωσσομάθεια και εργάστηκε ως ιδιωτική υπάλληλος. Έγινε γνωστή στο λογοτεχνικό χώρο με το έργο Λωξάντρα, που έγραψε σε ηλικία 65 χρονών, το 1962, και γνώρισε πολλές επανεκδόσεις. Η Λωξάντρα περιγράφει με μεγάλη ζωντάνια και χιούμορ τα έθιμα και τη ζωή των Ελλήνων της Πόλης και βασίζεται -
Rajaa Alsanea
Rajaa Alsanea (Arabic: رجاء الصانع; variant spelling Rajaa al-Sanea)is a Saudi writer who became famous through her novel Girls of Riyadh, or Banat al-Riyadh. The book was first published in Lebanon in 2005 and in English in 2007. The book was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 2009. Al-Sanea grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the daughter of a family of doctors. She currently lives in Chicago where she is a dental graduate student. She received her bachelor's degree in Dentistry from King Saud University in 2005. Her novel and lifestyle have caused controversy especially among the conservative sections of the Saudi society, but more liberal-minded individuals consider her a role model.
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Han Kang
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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소설가 한강
Han Kang was born in 1970 in South Korea. She is the author of The Vegetarian, winner of the International Booker Prize, as well as Human Acts, The White Book, Greek Lessons, and We Do Not Part. In 2024, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” -
Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli (عدنية شبلي) was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English with Clockroot Books as Touch (tr. Paula Haydar, 2010) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (tr. Paul Starkey, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004.
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Alan Bradley
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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With an education in electronic engineering, Alan worked at numerous radio and television stations in Ontario, and at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto, before becoming Director of Television Engineering in the media centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he remained for 25 years before taking early retirement to write in 1994.
He became the first President of the Saskatoon Writers, and a founding member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. His children's stories were published in The Canadian Children's Annual, and his short story, Meet Miss Mullen, was the first recipient of the Saskatchewan Writers -
Tahmima Anam
Tahmima Anam is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and anthropologist. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Granta Best Young British Novelist, and winner of a Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her work has been published in Granta, The New York Times, and The Guardian. She was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and lives in London, where she is on the board of ROLI, a music technology startup founded by her husband.
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The Startup Wife (07/13/2021) is her latest novel. -
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
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Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study -
V.S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of postcolonial societies, identity, and displacement. His works, which include both fiction and nonfiction, often depict themes of exile, cultural alienation, and the lingering effects of colonialism.
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He gained early recognition with A House for Mr Biswas, a novel inspired by his father’s struggles in Trinidad. His later works, such as The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, cemented his reputation as a masterful and incisive writer. Beyond fiction, his travelogues and essays, including Among the Believers and India: A Million Mutinies Now, reflected his critical perspective on societies in transition.
Naipaul -
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v.
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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.
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Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were ada -
Paulo Coelho
The Brazilian author PAULO COELHO was born in 1947 in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Before dedicating his life completely to literature, he worked as theatre director and actor, lyricist and journalist. In 1986, PAULO COELHO did the pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella, an experience later to be documented in his book The Pilgrimage. In the following year, COELHO published The Alchemist. Slow initial sales convinced his first publisher to drop the novel, but it went on to become one of the best selling Brazilian books of all time. Other titles include Brida (1990), The Valkyries (1992), By the river Piedra I sat Down and Wept (1994), the collection of his best columns published in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo entitle Maktub
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Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972.
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In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translat -
Rajaa Alsanea
Rajaa Alsanea (Arabic: رجاء الصانع; variant spelling Rajaa al-Sanea)is a Saudi writer who became famous through her novel Girls of Riyadh, or Banat al-Riyadh. The book was first published in Lebanon in 2005 and in English in 2007. The book was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award in 2009. Al-Sanea grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the daughter of a family of doctors. She currently lives in Chicago where she is a dental graduate student. She received her bachelor's degree in Dentistry from King Saud University in 2005. Her novel and lifestyle have caused controversy especially among the conservative sections of the Saudi society, but more liberal-minded individuals consider her a role model.
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Patricia Powell
Patricia Powell is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Mills College. She is the author four novels, including Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones (Beacon Press, 2003), The Pagoda (Harcourt, 1999), and The Fullness of Everything (Peepal Tree Press, 2009).
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Excerpts from her novels as well as her short stories have been widely anthologized, and she has lectured and led creative writing workshops in literary venues both nationally and internationally.
In 1993 Powell was a finalist for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists Award. Among other prizes, she is the recipient of a PEN New England Discovery Award, The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for fiction, and The Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers’ Awar