Authors Like Sylvia Plath

Anne Sexton

American · b. 1928 · Poet · Pulitzer 1967

Sexton began writing poetry in her late twenties on her psychiatrist's advice, and in 1959 she and Plath sat in the same Boston University class taught by Robert Lowell, going on to the Ritz bar together afterwards. Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Her daughter Linda Gray Sexton's memoir Searching for Mercy Street (1994) gives a much harder account of her as a mother, and is worth knowing about before you read the poems about her children.

Every book by Anne Sexton →

Robert Lowell

American · b. 1917 · Poet · Pulitzer 1947

Life Studies broke with the formal, impersonal American poetry of the 1950s and wrote openly about family, marriage and Lowell's own hospitalisations; the label “confessional” was first used in a review of it. Plath audited his class in 1959, and he wrote the introduction to the American edition of Ariel in 1966. The Dolphin (1973), which won the Pulitzer, reworked his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick's private letters into poems, and was objected to by his closest friend, Elizabeth Bishop.

Virginia Woolf

English · b. 1882 · Novelist and essayist

Woolf rebuilt the English novel around consciousness — the thought between two actions — and wrote openly in her essays about what it cost a woman to write at all. Mrs Dalloway sets a society hostess's day in London against a shell-shocked veteran's. Her diaries, published in part as A Writer's Diary in 1953, were among the books Plath read in England.

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

Janet Frame

New Zealand · b. 1924 · Novelist · Commonwealth Writers' Prize 1989

Frame spent most of eight years in New Zealand psychiatric hospitals after a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, and was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when her first book of stories won a national prize. Faces in the Water is a novel drawn from those years. Her three-volume autobiography became Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table (1990).

Susanna Kaysen

American · b. 1948 · Memoirist

In 1967, at eighteen, Kaysen was admitted to McLean Hospital outside Boston and stayed eighteen months. Girl, Interrupted is a short, fragmentary memoir of that time, with copies of her case file reproduced between the chapters. McLean is where Plath was treated in 1953, and where Lowell was a patient too.

Sharon Olds

American · b. 1942 · Poet · Pulitzer 2013

Olds writes about her parents, her children, sex and marriage with a directness that made her one of the most-read American poets of the last forty years. The Dead and the Living won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Stag's Leap, a sequence about her husband leaving her after thirty years, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Louise Glück

American · b. 1943 · Poet · Nobel 2020

Glück published her first collection in 1968 and won the Nobel Prize in 2020, cited for her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. The Wild Iris, a garden sequence in which flowers, the gardener and a god all speak, won the Pulitzer in 1993. Ararat is her book of family and grief.

Every book by Louise Glück →

Ottessa Moshfegh

American · b. 1981 · Novelist

My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows a young woman in Manhattan in 2000 who decides to sleep for a year with the help of a careless psychiatrist and a cabinet of prescriptions. Eileen, about a prison secretary in 1960s Massachusetts, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016.

Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-American · b. 1988 · Poet and novelist · T.S. Eliot Prize 2017

Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. Night Sky with Exit Wounds won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a novel written as a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it, about war, addiction and first love.

Every book by Ocean Vuong →

Elizabeth Bishop

American · b. 1911 · Poet · Pulitzer 1956

Bishop published only about a hundred poems and won the Pulitzer in 1956. She had as much private grief as any confessional poet — her father died before she was one and her mother was committed when she was five — and wrote about it almost never directly. She was Lowell's closest friend for thirty years and objected strongly when he put Hardwick's letters into The Dolphin.