Reading List

Authors Like Kahlil Gibran

Q: What should I read after The Prophet?

Try Gibran’s own The Garden of the Prophet, published after his death, or Tagore’s Gitanjali and Naimy’s The Book of Mirdad (1948).

Q: Does Kahlil Gibran have a new book?

No. Gibran died in New York on 10 April 1931; The Earth Gods (1931) was the last book published in his lifetime, and The Garden of the Prophet followed after his death.

Q: Which Kahlil Gibran book should I read first?

The Prophet (1923); then The Madman (1918), his first book in English, or Broken Wings (1912) for his Arabic fiction.

Q: Did Kahlil Gibran write in Arabic?

Yes. His early books, including Spirits Rebellious (1908), Broken Wings (1912) and A Tear and a Smile (1914), are in Arabic; he wrote in English from The Madman (1918).

Kahlil Gibran was twelve when he arrived in Boston’s South End in 1895 with his mother and three siblings from Mount Lebanon. Mary Haskell, a Boston headmistress nine years older than him, paid for his art training in Paris from 1908 and edited all his English writing. He wrote first in Arabic, including the poetic novella Broken Wings (1912), and in 1920 he re-founded the Pen League in New York with Mikhail Naimy and other Arab émigré writers, as its president. The Prophet (1923), in which a departing sage answers the townspeople’s questions on love, marriage, children and death, has never been out of print and has been translated into more than 100 languages. He died in New York in 1931, aged 48, and is buried in Bsharri in a former monastery that is now the Gibran Museum. The ten writers below share his form and his sources: wisdom spoken plainly, drawn from the Bible, Sufism and the Romantics.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Spiritual classics · Arab-American literature · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Kahlil Gibran, start with Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet of divine love, since Sufi mysticism was one of Gibran’s sources, and Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali (English 1912) brought devotional prose-poems to English readers a decade before The Prophet. Mikhail Naimy, his Pen League secretary, wrote his own book of a sage’s teachings, The Book of Mirdad (1948). Further down is Nietzsche, whose prophet Zarathustra teaches almost the opposite.

10 authors like Kahlil Gibran

The Sufi master

Rumi

Persian · Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (from 1244), Masnavi (begun c. 1258)

Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh or Wakhsh, in present-day Afghanistan or Tajikistan, and died in Konya, in present-day Turkey, in 1273. He wrote in Persian: lyric poems of longing for the divine and the long teaching poem the Masnavi. In English he is read in translations from R. A. Nicholson and A. J. Arberry to Coleman Barks.

Sufi mysticism was one of Gibran’s sources, and Rumi is its greatest poet: love as the way to God, taught through parables. Read Rumi for the mystical depth beneath The Prophet’s plain sayings.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rumi →

The poet-painter

William Blake

British · Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93)

Blake was born in Soho, London, in 1757, trained as an engraver and printed his own illuminated books, joining poems to his own images. He was largely ignored in his lifetime and died in London in 1827.

Gibran called Blake ‘the God-man’, and like Blake he was a painter as well as a poet, with a private, prophetic Christianity. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell shares his taste for the aphorism.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Blake →

The universal voice

Walt Whitman

American · Leaves of Grass (1855–1892), Specimen Days (1882)

Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819, worked as a newspaper editor and spent the Civil War visiting wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals. He published Leaves of Grass in six distinct editions, from 1855 to the deathbed edition of 1891–92. He died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892.

Whitman shares Gibran’s long, chanting lines and his faith in a soul that holds everything, nature and people alike. Read ‘Song of Myself’ after The Prophet.

— Lisanne

Every book by Walt Whitman →

The other prophet

Friedrich Nietzsche

German · The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Prussia, in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and was professor of classical philology at Basel from 1869 to 1879. Thus Spoke Zarathustra follows a prophet who comes down from the mountains to teach. He collapsed in 1889 and died in 1900.

Zarathustra is the obvious model for a prophet addressing the crowd, and Nietzsche’s influence appears in Gibran’s Arabic writing, though scholars say he was never under his spell. Nietzsche attacks the Christianity that Gibran honoured in Jesus, the Son of Man (1928); read them together to see the form put to opposite uses.

— Lisanne

Every book by Friedrich Nietzsche →

The first Arab-American novelist

Ameen Rihani

Lebanese-American · The Book of Khalid (1911), Maker of Modern Arabia (1928)

Rihani was born in Freike, Mount Lebanon, in 1876 and was sent to New York in 1888. The Book of Khalid, illustrated by Gibran, is described as the first English novel by an Arab author. He later travelled across Arabia, befriended Ibn Saud and wrote a trilogy about the region. He died in Freike in 1940.

Rihani was Gibran’s early friend and model, a Lebanese immigrant writing about East and West in English before him; their friendship cooled after 1912. The Book of Khalid is the founding text of the literature Gibran made famous.

— Lisanne

The Pen League secretary

Mikhail Naimy

Lebanese · Kahlil Gibran: A Biography (Arabic 1936; English 1950), The Book of Mirdad (1948)

Naimy was born in Baskinta, Mount Lebanon, in 1889, studied at the seminary in Poltava and at the University of Washington, and was secretary of the Pen League when Gibran was its president. He returned to Lebanon in 1932 and lived in Baskinta until his death in 1988, aged 98.

Naimy knew Gibran as well as anyone and wrote his biography. The Book of Mirdad is his own book of a teacher’s sayings, the nearest thing to a companion volume for The Prophet.

— Lisanne

Songs for the West

Rabindranath Tagore

Indian · Gitanjali (Bengali 1910; English 1912), The Home and the World (1916)

Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861, the youngest of thirteen surviving children, and wrote in Bengali, translating some of his own work into English. Gitanjali, published in English as Song Offerings, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first awarded to a non-European. He died in 1941.

Tagore and Gibran were the two writers who brought Eastern devotional poetry to a mass English-reading audience in the 1910s and 1920s, in short, plain prose-poems. Read Gitanjali first.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rabindranath Tagore →

Letters on living

Rainer Maria Rilke

Austrian · Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

Rilke was born in Prague in 1875 and wrote in German, with late poems in French. He wrote a book on Auguste Rodin (1903), whom Gibran also met in Paris. Letters to a Young Poet, his advice to an aspiring writer, was published after his death in Switzerland in 1926.

Letters to a Young Poet gives the same kind of counsel as The Prophet, on love, solitude and work, to a single listener. It suits readers who want Gibran’s tenderness with more doubt in it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rainer Maria Rilke →

The spiritual parable

Hermann Hesse

German-Swiss · Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927)

Hesse was born in Germany, the son of a mother born in India to missionary parents, and lived in Switzerland from 1912, becoming a Swiss citizen in 1923. Siddhartha follows a young man in the Buddha’s time on his search for enlightenment. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

Siddhartha appeared a year before The Prophet and, like it, became a book readers press on one another: a short parable of the spiritual life, drawing on Eastern sources for Western readers.

— Lisanne

Every book by Hermann Hesse →

Wisdom in a small book

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

French · Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), The Little Prince (1943)

Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon in 1900 and flew mail routes for Aéropostale in North Africa and South America, the source of his books about flight. The Little Prince, which he illustrated himself, is a fable about love and loss told to a pilot stranded in the desert. He disappeared on a reconnaissance flight in 1944.

The Little Prince is the other short, illustrated book of wisdom that people give each other at weddings, births and funerals. Like Gibran, Saint-Exupéry speaks simply about love and death and drew his own pictures.

— Lisanne

Every book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry →

Where to start if you loved Kahlil Gibran

If you want the Sufi source, read Rumi.

Start with a selection of the lyric poems; Coleman Barks’s translations are the most read.

If you want his contemporary from the East, read Rabindranath Tagore.

Gitanjali (English 1912) is short and devotional.

If you want his circle, read Mikhail Naimy.

The Book of Mirdad (1948) is the closest book to The Prophet.

If you want a counter-voice, read Friedrich Nietzsche.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra uses the prophet’s form to argue against the pieties.

If you want to go back to Gibran, start with The Prophet.

Then read The Madman (1918) and the Arabic novella Broken Wings (1912).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kahlil Gibran

Who writes like Kahlil Gibran?

Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore and Mikhail Naimy are the closest: Rumi for Sufi love poetry, Tagore for devotional prose-poems in English, Naimy for a sage’s teachings in The Book of Mirdad.

What should I read after The Prophet?

Try Gibran’s own The Garden of the Prophet, published after his death, or Tagore’s Gitanjali and Naimy’s The Book of Mirdad (1948).

Is Kahlil Gibran like Rumi?

Partly: Sufi mysticism was one of Gibran’s sources, but so were the King James Bible and William Blake. Rumi wrote in Persian in the thirteenth century; Gibran wrote in Arabic and English in the twentieth.

Does Kahlil Gibran have a new book?

No. Gibran died in New York on 10 April 1931; The Earth Gods (1931) was the last book published in his lifetime, and The Garden of the Prophet followed after his death.

Which Kahlil Gibran book should I read first?

The Prophet (1923); then The Madman (1918), his first book in English, or Broken Wings (1912) for his Arabic fiction.

Did Kahlil Gibran write in Arabic?

Yes. His early books, including Spirits Rebellious (1908), Broken Wings (1912) and A Tear and a Smile (1914), are in Arabic; he wrote in English from The Madman (1918).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Kahlil Gibran

10 authors like Kahlil Gibran

Rumi

William Blake

Walt Whitman

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ameen Rihani

Mikhail Naimy

Rabindranath Tagore

Rainer Maria Rilke

Hermann Hesse

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Where to start if you loved Kahlil Gibran

Frequently asked questions about authors like Kahlil Gibran

Who writes like Kahlil Gibran?

What should I read after The Prophet?

Is Kahlil Gibran like Rumi?

Does Kahlil Gibran have a new book?

Which Kahlil Gibran book should I read first?

Did Kahlil Gibran write in Arabic?

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