Author guides

Authors

I read the way some people collect postcards — a little obsessively, and always looking for the thing that tells me something true about a person. This page is where I keep track of every author I've written about: their preoccupations, their voice, the thread that runs through their work. It's a working library, not a highlight reel.

1116 author guides, A to Z

Before you search A to Z

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By country

Seven national traditions, and every other country on one page.

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By movement

Schools of thought and style, from the Stoics to Gonzo.

StoicsTranscendentalistsExistentialistsAbsurdistsBeat GenerationGonzo

By outlook

Writers on awareness, the self and the mind.

Non-dualityBuddhist writersSpiritual teachersPsychologists

By who they are

Women writers, LGBTQ authors, reporters and doctors, pen names and lives cut short.

Female authorsLGBTQ authorsPrize-winning womenPen namesWriters who died youngWomen war correspondentsDoctors who write

By form

Short stories, memoirs, essays, diaries and letters.

Short story writersMemoiristsEssayistsDiarists and letter writers

A

A. H. AlmaasFounded the Diamond Approach, joining depth psychology with mystical traditions.
A.J. JacobsTurns himself into the experiment, living by the Bible or reading the encyclopedia cover to cover.
Abby WambachAmerican footballer, two-time Olympic champion and 2015 World Cup winner, author of Forward (2016) and Wolfpack (2019).
Abraham VergheseMedicine from the doctor’s side of the bed, in memoir and fiction.
Adam GrantOrganizational psychologist who argues that givers, rethinkers, and late bloomers get further than the culture assumes.
Adam HigginbothamInvestigative writer who turns catastrophic engineering failures into gripping, forensic narrative.
Adam HochschildNarrative histories of people who fought injustice, above all King Leopold's Ghost on the Congo.
Adam KayBritish writer and former doctor, author of This Is Going to Hurt (2017), based on his diaries as an NHS junior doctor.
Adam Leith GollnerWrites about the obsessions of fruit hunters and the eternal quest for immortality.
Adi ShankaraSet out Advaita Vedanta: the self is not different from Brahman.
Adrian Nicole LeBlancSpent a decade embedded with one family to write about poverty, love, and the Bronx from the inside.
Adrienne RichMoved from formal verse to openly political, feminist poetry, as in Diving into the Wreck.
AdyashantiTeaches awakening in plain, jargon-free language rooted in Zen practice.
Agatha ChristieBuilt the modern mystery novel one impossible murder at a time, and outsold nearly everyone doing it.
Aimee BenderFiction where one impossible thing, like tasting feelings in food, is followed through with real feeling.
Akira KurosawaJapanese director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai whose autobiography is a candid portrait of an artist's making.
Al PacinoAmerican actor, Academy Award winner for Scent of a Woman, author of the memoir Sonny Boy (2024).
Al-GhazaliCritiqued the philosophers who followed Avicenna and wrote a forty-book guide to Islamic life.
Alain de BottonApplies philosophy to love, status, work and travel, from The Consolations of Philosophy to The School of Life.
Alan AldaAmerican actor, writer and science communicator, author of Never Have Your Dog Stuffed (2005) and If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? (2017).
Alan HollinghurstFinely written novels of gay life and English class, above all The Line of Beauty.
Alan WattsExplained Zen, Taoism and Vedanta to Western readers in plain language.
Albert CamusMade the absurd feel less like philosophy and more like a Tuesday afternoon.
Aldo LeopoldA Sand County Almanac and its “land ethic”.
Aldous HuxleyWrote Brave New World, then spent his life exploring perception and mysticism.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynBore witness to the Soviet camps, in fiction and in The Gulag Archipelago.
Alex BerensonFormer New York Times reporter turned spy novelist, whose John Wells thrillers borrow the texture of real intelligence work.
Alex KotlowitzWrites about Chicago's violence through the children and families who live with it.
Alexis OkeowoNew Yorker writer who follows ordinary Africans standing up to extremism, and refuses to turn them into symbols.
Alfred DöblinDoctor-novelist whose Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) became the great German city novel.
Alfred North WhiteheadCo-wrote Principia Mathematica and founded process philosophy.
Ali WongAmerican comedian, actor and writer, author of Dear Girls (2019), known for the Netflix stand-up special Baby Cobra and the series Beef.
Alice McDermottQuiet, closely observed novels about Irish Catholic families in Brooklyn, such as Charming Billy.
Alice MillerThe hidden cruelty of ordinary child-rearing and its cost in adult life.
Alice MunroNobel laureate who found entire lifetimes inside ordinary small-town moments. Nothing dramatic happens in a Munro story, and everything does.
Alice WalkerPoet, activist and author of The Color Purple, the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction.
Alma GuillermoprietoFormer dancer who became Latin America's great chronicler for English-language readers.
Amanda PalmerMusician who turned a viral talk about asking for help into a book about trust, art, and money.
Amanda PetrusichMusic critic who went among the obsessive collectors of the rarest old records.
Amanda RipleyJournalist who studies how people behave in disasters, classrooms, and conflicts that feel impossible to escape.
Amitav GhoshBig historical novels of the Indian Ocean and the opium trade, and sharp essays on climate.
Amor TowlesWrites elegant, old-world novels about people who make confinement look like the good life.
Amy GoldsteinFollowed one Wisconsin town for years after its General Motors plant shut down.
Amy LiptrotThe Outrun, a memoir of recovery from alcoholism told through the landscape and weather of Orkney.
Amy PoehlerAmerican comedian, actor and writer, Saturday Night Live cast member and star of Parks and Recreation, author of the memoir Yes Please (2014).
Amy TanChinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters.
Anaïs NinWrote diaries as if her inner life were the main event and everything else just backdrop — intimacy examined without apology.
Anand GiridharadasAsks why the rich keep promising to fix the problems they help create.
Anand GopalTold the war in Afghanistan through Afghan eyes, from villages rather than military bases.
Anatole BroyardNew York Times book critic whose essays on his own dying became Intoxicated by My Illness.
Andre AgassiAmerican former tennis player, winner of eight Grand Slam singles titles, and author of the autobiography Open (2009).
André BretonFounder and leader of Surrealism.
Andrea ElliottImmersive reporting on people at the edges of American life.
Andrew McCarthyAmerican actor, director and travel writer, author of Brat: An '80s Story (2021) and Walking with Sam (2023).
Andrew SolomonWrites about depression and difference with the honesty of someone who has lived it.
Angela CarterRewrote fairy tales with teeth in The Bloody Chamber.
Angela DuckworthPsychologist who made grit a household word by measuring what actually keeps people going.
Angelus SilesiusShort rhyming couplets of mystical paradox about God and the soul.
Anil SethConscious experience as a “controlled hallucination” the brain generates by prediction.
Anita BrooknerQuiet, precise novels about clever, solitary people, above all the Booker winner Hotel du Lac.
Anita ShreveNovels about families overturned by a single event, often on the New England coast, like The Pilot's Wife.
Anjelica HustonAmerican actor and author of the memoirs A Story Lately Told (2013) and Watch Me (2014).
Ann PatchettNovelist and bookstore owner whose fiction treats found families as seriously as blood ones.
Ann PetryThe Street (1946), a Harlem novel about a single mother.
Ann RuleFormer police officer who worked beside Ted Bundy and went on to define the American true-crime book.
Anna Deavere SmithTurns real interviews into one-woman theater, letting American crises speak in their own words.
Anna LembkePsychiatrist mapping how a culture built for pleasure quietly rewired everyone's tolerance for pain.
Anna PolitkovskayaReported the Chechen wars and Putin's Russia from the ground, and paid for it with her life.
Anne ApplebaumHistories of Soviet repression, like Gulag, and journalism on how authoritarian regimes keep power.
Anne BrontëYoungest Bronte sister, author of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, about a woman who leaves an abusive husband.
Anne CarsonJoins classical Greek scholarship to poetry, essay and drama, above all in Autobiography of Red.
Anne EnrightDarkly funny novels about Irish families, above all The Gathering.
Anne FadimanWrote a classic of medicine and culture, and some of the most delightful essays about reading.
Anne FrankThe diary of a Jewish girl hiding in Amsterdam, read by millions.
Anne LamottWrites about faith, sobriety, and the writing life with an honesty that keeps the jokes and the despair in the same paragraph.
Anne Morrow LindberghPioneering aviator and author of Gift from the Sea.
Anne SextonConfessional poet who wrote about womanhood and breakdown with unnerving, exacting precision.
Anne TylerBaltimore novelist who has spent decades finding drama in families that never raise their voices.
Annie DillardWatches a creek or a moth with the attention most people save for a crisis, and finds the crisis was there all along.
Annie ErnauxNobel laureate who turned her own life into flat, unflinching documentary prose.
Annie JacobsenInvestigative journalist mapping the secret programs of the Pentagon and CIA from declassified files and interviews.
Annie ProulxHarsh landscapes and the people they shape, from Newfoundland to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain.
Anthony BourdainChef who wrote about kitchens and travel with a punk's contempt for pretension and a real hunger for other people's lives.
Anthony DoerrPatient, luminous novels that connect lives across centuries, from All the Light We Cannot See on.
Anthony HorowitzPlays with the mystery form itself, in Magpie Murders, the Hawthorne books and new Bond and Holmes novels.
Anthony KiedisA rock memoir that trades swagger for surprising honesty about addiction, fatherhood, and the cost of the wild years.
Anthony TrollopeVictorian chronicler of clergy, politicians and money, from Barchester to the Pallisers.
Antoine de Saint-ExupéryPilot who wrote The Little Prince, and whose memoirs of flying mail over the desert are just as luminous.
Anton ChekhovDoctor and playwright who ended stories where most writers would start them, and changed the short story for good.
Antonio DamasioNeurologist who argues that emotion and feeling are part of how the brain reasons.
Ariel LawhonHistorical novelist who takes real, half-forgotten women and gives their lives the suspense of a thriller.
Ariel SabarDogged investigator who exposed a forged gospel and traced his father's lost Kurdish-Jewish world.
Arlan HamiltonFounded Backstage Capital while homeless to fund women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ founders.
Arne NæssCoined the term “deep ecology” in 1973.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerAustrian-American bodybuilder, actor, former Governor of California and author of Total Recall (2012) and Be Useful (2023).
Arnon GrunbergDutch novelist who goes undercover in hotels, care homes and war zones to see from the inside.
Arthur C. DantoAsked why Warhol’s Brillo Box is art when the supermarket carton is not.
Arthur Conan DoyleCreated Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and wrote historical adventure and science fiction besides.
Arthur KoestlerDarkness at Noon, a defining novel about Stalin’s show trials.
Arthur SchopenhauerPhilosopher of pessimism who saw a blind will behind everything, in The World as Will and Representation.
Arundhati RoyWon the Booker with The God of Small Things, then spent decades writing essays against the powerful.
Ashley JuddAmerican actress and activist, author of the memoir All That Is Bitter and Sweet (2011), written with Maryanne Vollers.
Åsne SeierstadNorwegian reporter who lives with the people she writes about, from a Kabul bookseller to Russia at war.
Attar of NishapurPersian Sufi poet who turned the soul’s journey towards God into a story of birds.
Atul GawandeSurgeon-writer obsessed with why smart, careful people still make preventable mistakes.
Audre LordeSelf-described Black lesbian warrior poet whose essays on anger, silence and difference still cut.
Augustine of HippoThe Confessions and The City of God, which shaped Western Christian teaching.
Austin KleonWrites small, illustrated books that treat creativity as a set of habits anyone can steal.
Azadeh MoaveniReports on women's lives under political pressure in Iran and the Middle East, as in Guest House for Young Widows.
Azar NafisiHow reading forbidden Western novels helped her live through the Islamic Republic.
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B

Bae SuahKorean novelist and translator of dreamlike, unsettling fiction where time, place and identity keep shifting.
Banana YoshimotoShort, plain-spoken novels about young people living through loss.
Barack ObamaTwo memoirs written twenty-five years apart, before and after the presidency.
Barbara Brown TaylorEpiscopal priest who left parish ministry and wrote about finding God outside the church, as in Leaving Church.
Barbara DemickForeign correspondent who gets entire closed societies to open up, one ordinary life at a time.
Barbara EhrenreichWent undercover in minimum-wage America and came back with an indictment, not just a memoir.
Barbara KingsolverNovels rooted in place and conscience, where the environment is never just scenery.
Barbara PymQuiet, comic novels about clergy and unmarried women in post-war England, such as Excellent Women.
Barbra StreisandAmerican singer, actor and director, author of My Passion for Design (2010) and the memoir My Name Is Barbra (2023).
Barry LopezNature writing that joins science, history and Indigenous knowledge.
Baruch SpinozaIdentified God with nature and argued for freedom of thought.
Beatriz WilliamsDual-timeline historical novels about wealthy American families, many set on the island of Winthrop.
bell hooksMade feminist theory readable without making it smaller.
Bella MackieDark comic novelist who turns female rage into genuinely funny crime fiction.
Ben GoldfarbEnvironmental journalist who makes beavers and roadkill reveal how the whole landscape works.
Ben MacintyreWrites true spy stories of the Second World War and the Cold War with the pace of a thriller.
Bernardine EvaristoNovels in verse about Black British lives; Girl, Woman, Other made her the first Black woman to win the Booker.
Bernardo KastrupAnalytic idealism: consciousness, not matter, is the basis of reality.
Bertrand RussellA founder of modern logic who also wrote widely read books for general readers.
Bessel van der KolkPsychiatrist whose work reframed trauma as something the body remembers long after the mind moves on.
Beth MacyReports on America's left-behind towns, from a furniture factory to the frontline of the opioid crisis.
Bethany McLeanJournalist who first asked how Enron made its money, and kept following the money.
Betty FriedanHer Feminine Mystique named 'the problem that has no name' and helped launch second-wave feminism.
Bianca BoskerTalks her way into the worlds of sommeliers and contemporary art to learn how taste works.
Bill BrysonTravel and popular-science writer who makes curiosity feel like the funniest thing a person can have.
Bill BufordWent among football hooligans, then into the kitchens of Italy and France to learn to cook.
Bill McKibbenThe first book on climate change for general readers, and founder of 350.org.
Billie Jean KingAmerican tennis champion and equality campaigner, winner of 39 Grand Slam titles and author of All In: An Autobiography (2021).
Bob DylanAmerican singer-songwriter and author, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, author of Chronicles: Volume One (2004) and The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022).
Bob MortimerEnglish comedian and author, one half of Reeves and Mortimer, author of the memoir And Away... (2021) and the novel The Satsuma Complex (2022).
Bob OdenkirkAmerican actor and comedy writer, known for Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, author of the memoir Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (2022).
Bob WoodwardReported Watergate with Carl Bernstein and has written inside accounts of presidents ever since.
BoethiusThe Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison while awaiting execution.
BonoIrish singer of U2, campaigner and author of the memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (2022).
Bozoma Saint JohnMarketing executive at PepsiCo, Apple Music, Uber and Netflix, and author of The Urgent Life.
Bradley HopeFinancial investigator who follows the money behind billion-dollar frauds and royal power.
Brandi CarlileAmerican singer-songwriter and author of the memoir Broken Horses (2021).
Brendan I. KoernerDigs strange forgotten episodes, a wartime manhunt, an epidemic of hijackings, out of the archives.
Brené BrownResearch on shame and vulnerability that somehow became permission to be honest.
Bret Easton EllisCool, affectless fiction about wealthy young people in the 1980s, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho.
Brian EnoInvented ambient music, produced decades of rock records and kept the diary A Year with Swollen Appendices.
Brian WeissA Yale-trained psychiatrist who started documenting past-life regression cases his own training told him to dismiss.
Britney SpearsPop singer whose memoir The Woman in Me tells her side of the conservatorship that ran her life.
Brooke KroegerHistorian of undercover journalism, tracing the reporters who lied to tell the truth.
Brooke ShieldsAmerican actor, model and author of Down Came the Rain (2005), There Was a Little Girl (2014) and Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old (2025).
Bruce ChatwinTravel writing that mixes journey, history and storytelling, from In Patagonia on.
Bruce D. PerryChild psychiatrist who explains how early trauma shapes the brain, and how relationships help children heal.
Bruce HolsingerMedievalist-turned-novelist who brings scholarly rigor to historical fiction.
Bruce LeeMartial artist whose notebooks turn fighting into a philosophy of being like water.
Bruce SpringsteenAmerican singer-songwriter and author of the autobiography Born to Run (2016) and, with Barack Obama, Renegades: Born in the USA (2021).
Byron KatieFour questions and a turnaround: The Work, her method for questioning painful thoughts.
Byung-Chul HanShort essays on self-exploitation, burnout and digital overload.
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C

C.K. PrahaladManagement thinker who argued that the world's poorest consumers are a market and a source of innovation.
Cal NewportComputer scientist who argues for deep work and less digital noise.
Camille PagliaSexual Personae (1990): pagan, sexual images run through all of Western art.
Candice MillardTakes one forgotten episode, like Roosevelt on the River of Doubt, and makes it unputdownable.
Carl JungSplit from Freud and built an entire vocabulary for the unconscious that outlived the argument.
Carl RogersFounded person-centred therapy, the idea that people change through empathy, not advice.
Carl SaganAstronomer who brought the cosmos to millions through Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot and The Demon-Haunted World.
Carl von ClausewitzOn War argues that war is politics by other means, shaped by chance, emotion and friction.
Carl ZimmerScience writer who makes genetics, parasites and the definition of life gripping.
Carlo RovelliQuantum gravity researcher who writes short, widely translated books on physics.
Carlos CastanedaThe don Juan books, presented as his apprenticeship to a Yaqui sorcerer.
Carmen Maria MachadoGenre-bending stories and In the Dream House, a memoir of an abusive relationship told in fragments.
Carol DweckStanford psychologist behind Mindset, the idea that believing ability can grow changes how we learn and fail.
Caroline KnappDrinking: A Love Story, a frank memoir of her years as a high-functioning alcoholic.
Carrie BrownsteinAmerican musician, actor and writer, guitarist of Sleater-Kinney and co-creator of Portlandia, author of the memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015).
Carrie FisherAmerican actress and writer, Princess Leia in Star Wars, author of Postcards from the Edge (1987), Wishful Drinking (2008) and The Princess Diarist (2016).
Carson McCullersLonely misfits in small Southern towns, told with tenderness, from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter on.
Celeste NgNovelist of suburban families whose careful surfaces hide everything nobody says out loud.
Chanel MillerReclaimed her own name and story after being known only as a victim's statement.
Charles DarwinThe theory of evolution by natural selection.
Charles DickensTurned serialized fiction into social conscience, one impossibly named character at a time.
Charles DuhiggExplains how habits and productivity work, story by story.
Charles EisensteinArgues that crises from money to climate grow out of a “story of separation”.
Charles GraeberInvestigative writer of true crime and medical breakthroughs, from The Good Nurse on.
Charles JohnsonPhilosophical novels about slavery and Black American history, above all Middle Passage.
Charles YuWrote Interior Chinatown, a novel in screenplay form about Asian American typecasting in Hollywood.
Charlotte BrontëFirst-person novels about women who trust their own judgement, above all Jane Eyre and Villette.
Charlotte DelboAuschwitz in fragments of prose and poetry, for the women of her convoy.
Charlotte Perkins GilmanWrote one of the first great feminist horror stories, then spent a career arguing for a different one.
CherAmerican singer and actor, Academy Award winner for Moonstruck, author of The First Time (1998) and Cher: The Memoir, Part One (2024).
Cheryl StrayedTurned a solo hike and a shattered life into one of the defining memoirs of grief.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieWrites about identity, feminism, and home with a clarity that made her TED talk as widely quoted as her novels.
Chögyam TrungpaBrought Tibetan Buddhism to the West and founded Naropa University.
Chris AndersonTED's head curator, writing about what makes an idea actually spread.
Chris De StoopFlemish reporter who writes about the disappearing countryside and the people left behind.
Chrissie HyndeAmerican-born singer-songwriter of the Pretenders and author of the memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2015).
Christa WolfWrote from inside East Germany about memory, conscience and women’s lives.
Christina LambVeteran war correspondent who tells conflict through the women it usually leaves out, and co-wrote I Am Malala.
Christine PrideFormer book editor writing novels about friendship and race, like We Are Not Like Them with Jo Piazza.
Christopher HitchensContrarian essayist who took on Mother Teresa, Kissinger and God with equal relish.
Christopher LeonardBusiness journalist who explains how corporate power and the Federal Reserve actually shape ordinary lives.
Chuang TzuDaoist sage whose playful parables, the butterfly dream among them, unsettle every fixed point of view.
Chuck PalahniukDark, darkly funny first-person novels about people on the margins, above all Fight Club.
Cicely TysonActress whose late-life memoir insisted on dignity as a career-long, deliberate choice.
Claire KeeganIrish writer whose short novels do in a hundred pages what most books need four hundred for.
Clarice LispectorIntense, inward Brazilian fiction that turns small moments into crises, as in The Passion According to G.H.
Clarissa Pinkola EstésReads folk tales as maps of the psyche in Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Claudia RankineCitizen: An American Lyric, poems, prose and images about everyday racism that reached the bestseller lists.
Clint SmithVisits the places where Americans remember slavery and asks how honestly each tells it.
Colin WilsonThe Outsider (1956), the bestseller that helped popularise existentialism in Britain.
Colm TóibínIrish novelist of restraint and exile, from Brooklyn to The Magician.
Colson WhiteheadTwo-time Pulitzer winner who moves between genres, from The Underground Railroad to Harlem heists.
Cormac McCarthyProse stripped of punctuation and comfort, aimed straight at American violence and grace.
Curtis SittenfeldClose, unsparing first-person portraits of women, from Prep to the Laura Bush novel American Wife.
Cynthia BourgeaultTeaches Centering Prayer and Christianity as a Wisdom tradition.
Czesław MiłoszPolish poet who wrote about war, exile and faith.
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D

D. T. SuzukiJapanese scholar who did more than anyone to bring Zen to Western readers.
D.H. LawrenceNovels about sexuality, class and the industrial Midlands, censored in his lifetime.
D.T. MaxNew Yorker writer and biographer of David Foster Wallace, drawn to minds that burn too brightly.
Daisy JohnsonUnsettling fiction where myth and landscape shape stories of mothers and daughters, like Everything Under.
Dan ArielyBehavioral economist showing exactly how irrational people are, with the receipts to prove it.
Dan BaumListened to New Orleans for years and let nine of its people tell the city in their own voices.
Daniel H. PinkTurns behavioural science into readable books about motivation, timing and regret.
Daniel J. SiegelFounded interpersonal neurobiology and turned brain science into language for parents.
Daniel KahnemanNobel psychologist who showed how fast and slow thinking lead us astray.
Danielle LaPorteThe Desire Map, which sets goals by how you want to feel rather than what you want to achieve.
Dante AlighieriThe Divine Comedy, a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
Daphne du MaurierCornwall, jealousy and dread, from Rebecca to Don’t Look Now.
Dava SobelTells the history of science through the people, often women, who made it.
Dave CullenSpent a decade dismantling the myths about Columbine and what followed.
Dave EggersNovelist, editor and McSweeney's founder who moves between playful memoir and urgent books about the tech age.
Dave GrohlAmerican musician, drummer of Nirvana and founder of the Foo Fighters, author of the memoir The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music (2021).
David AbramCoined “more-than-human world”, joining phenomenology and fieldwork with indigenous peoples.
David BohmA deterministic interpretation of quantum theory, and the idea of the implicate order.
David BrooksA columnist who turned from analyzing politics to asking what actually makes a person good, and wrote his way toward an answer.
David ByrneTalking Heads frontman who argues that music is shaped by the places it is played.
David EnrichJournalist who digs into banks and law firms until their respectable facades give way.
David EpsteinScience writer arguing that generalists, not early specialists, often win in the long run.
David Foster WallaceMaximalist essays and fiction that turned footnotes into part of the story.
David George HaskellNature writing built on a biologist’s patient attention to one place, one tree, one sound.
David GrannNarrative journalist who finds the one true story stranger than any thriller.
David HalberstamVietnam War reporting that contradicted the official version, and The Best and the Brightest.
David LynchDreamlike, unsettling films from Eraserhead to Twin Peaks, and a book on meditation, Catching the Big Fish.
David McCulloughPulitzer-winning historian who told American history through people, from the Brooklyn Bridge to John Adams.
David QuammenFollows field scientists to explain extinction and disease.
David SedarisPersonal essays that get funnier the closer they get to something painful.
David SheffWrote about his son's addiction from the terrifying, powerless side of parenthood.
David Van ReybrouckFlemish writer who built histories of Congo and Indonesia from hundreds of eyewitness voices.
David Wallace-WellsThe Uninhabitable Earth, a warning about the worst of climate change.
David WhyteBrings poetry into talk about work and leadership, and wrote short essays on single words in Consolations.
Dawn FrenchWelsh-born British comedian, actor and writer, co-creator of French and Saunders and author of the memoir Dear Fatty and five novels.
Dawn O'PorterNovelist and broadcaster writing sharp, funny fiction about female friendship and body image.
Debbie HarryAmerican singer of Blondie and author of the memoir Face It (2019).
Deborah BlumScience writer who turns forensic chemistry and poison into genuine page-turners.
Deborah FeldmanLeft the Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn with her young son and wrote Unorthodox.
Deborah LevyShort, image-driven novels like Hot Milk and Swimming Home, and a three-part memoir about starting again.
Deepak ChopraPhysician turned spiritual writer blending Ayurveda, meditation and mind-body health.
Demi LovatoSinger and former Disney actor whose books, such as Staying Strong, deal with mental health and addiction.
Demi MooreAmerican actor and author of the memoir Inside Out (2019), known for St. Elmo's Fire, Ghost and The Substance.
Denis JohnsonAddicts, drifters and grace in flashes, from Jesus’ Son to Train Dreams.
Derek SiversFounded CD Baby and writes very short books on business and how to live, like Anything You Want.
Derek WalcottGave the Caribbean an epic of its own in Omeros.
Derren BrownMentalist who shows how easily minds are steered, then writes about happiness with surprising Stoic calm.
Dexter FilkinsReported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times and wrote The Forever War.
Diane AckermanNature writing joining science and poetry, like A Natural History of the Senses, and The Zookeeper's Wife.
Diane ChamberlainBook-club novels about long-kept family secrets, many set in North Carolina, such as Necessary Lies.
Diane KeatonAmerican actor, director and author of the memoirs Then Again (2011) and Brother & Sister (2020), and of books on photography and design.
Diane von FurstenbergDesigner of the wrap dress who writes about building a life and a brand on her own terms.
DōgenFounded Sōtō Zen in Japan and wrote the Shōbōgenzō.
Dolly AldertonChronicled millennial friendship and heartbreak with disarming, diary-like honesty.
Dolly PartonAmerican country singer, songwriter, actor and author, founder of the Imagination Library, and author of Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (2020).
Don DeLilloProphetic novels about media, terror and American paranoia.
Don Miguel RuizTurned what he calls Toltec wisdom into four short rules for everyday life in The Four Agreements.
Donald HoffmanThe interface theory of perception: our senses hide reality behind a simplified desktop.
Donald RobertsonJoins Stoic philosophy and cognitive-behavioural therapy, through Marcus Aurelius.
Donna Jackson NakazawaHow childhood adversity and stress shape adult physical and mental health.
Donna TarttWrites maybe once a decade, and each novel justifies the wait.
Doris Kearns GoodwinPresidential historian who turns leadership into storytelling, from Team of Rivals on.
Doris LessingNobel laureate who wrote about women, politics and the colonial Africa she grew up in.
Dorothy L. SayersCreated Lord Peter Wimsey and wrote detective novels with the depth of serious fiction, as well as essays and translation.
Douglas AdamsTurned a BBC radio comedy about the end of the world into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Douglas HardingThe “Headless Way”, tested through simple experiments rather than belief.
Douglas HofstadterArgues, from Gödel, Escher, Bach onwards, that the self is a “strange loop”.
Douglas StoneCo-wrote Difficult Conversations, practical advice from the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Douglas StuartBooker winner writing about Glasgow, addiction and love in Shuggie Bain.
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E

E.B. WhiteWrote children's classics and a style guide, and somehow both still hold up.
E.E. CummingsPoems that break apart words, punctuation and capitals to slow the reader down.
E.O. WilsonThe world’s leading expert on ants and the founder of sociobiology.
Eckhart TolleSpiritual teacher whose case for living in the present moment became one of the best-selling ideas of the century.
Ed CatmullCo-founded Pixar and led it for over thirty years, and wrote about its culture in Creativity, Inc.
Ed YongPulitzer-winning science writer who asks what the world feels like to every creature except us.
Edgar Allan PoeInventor of the detective story and master of the short, airless horror tale.
Edith WhartonNew York society and the cages it builds, from The House of Mirth to The Age of Innocence.
Edward P. JonesThe Known World, a Pulitzer-winning novel about a Black slaveholder in Virginia.
Edwidge DanticatFiction and memoir about Haiti and its diaspora.
Elaine N. AronIdentified high sensitivity, or sensory processing sensitivity.
Elaine PagelsBrought the Nag Hammadi gospels, left out of the Bible, to general readers.
Elena FerranteThe Neapolitan novels and the lifelong friendship of Elena and Lila.
Elie WieselTestimony so spare it refuses you the comfort of looking away. Night remains the account against which others are measured.
Elif ShafakNovels about the histories Turkey and its neighbours keep silent about.
Elin HilderbrandNantucket-set fiction that turned beach reading into its own reliable genre.
Elisabeth Kübler-RossDescribed the five stages of dying and grief.
Eliza GriswoldPoet and reporter writing about faith, land and fracking, with a Pulitzer for Amity and Prosperity.
Elizabeth BergWarm, plainly written novels about ordinary women coming through loss and illness, from Open House on.
Elizabeth BishopExact, unhurried poems of travel, landscape and loss, including the villanelle One Art.
Elizabeth Cady StantonLed the early American women's rights movement and co-wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848.
Elizabeth GaskellVictorian novelist of mill towns and country towns, from North and South to Cranford.
Elizabeth GilbertAte, prayed, and loved her way into redefining the modern self-discovery memoir.
Elizabeth HardwickCritic, co-founder of The New York Review of Books and author of Sleepless Nights, a novel built from memory.
Elizabeth KolbertEnvironmental journalist who made mass extinction feel immediate rather than abstract.
Elizabeth RushFollows rising seas from American shorelines to an Antarctic glacier, through the people living at the water's edge.
Elizabeth StroutPulitzer winner whose small-town Maine characters are prickly, lonely, and impossible to forget.
Elliot PageCanadian actor and producer, known for Juno (2007) and The Umbrella Academy, and author of the memoir Pageboy (2023).
Elton JohnEnglish singer, pianist and composer, and author of Love Is the Cure (2012) and the autobiography Me (2019).
Elvis CostelloEnglish singer-songwriter and author of the memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (2015).
Elyn R. SaksMental health law scholar who made her own schizophrenia public in a 2007 memoir.
Emanuel SwedenborgSwedish scientist who turned, in his fifties, to visions of heaven and hell.
Emanuele CocciaPhilosophical essays that start from plants and metamorphosis.
Emily BrontëWrote one novel and it was enough — a love story so unruly it still resists being called romantic.
Emily DickinsonWrote nearly 1,800 poems in near-total seclusion and rewired what a poem could do.
Emily HenryWitty contemporary romances, each with its own couple, from Beach Read to five Goodreads Choice wins.
Emma GredeBuilt a business empire from the supply-chain side of fame, then started writing about the parts of entrepreneurship nobody photographs.
Emmanuel CarrèreBlurs memoir and true crime until you stop asking which one you're reading — his own doubt is always part of the story.
Emmanuel LevinasEthics as first philosophy: the face of another makes a claim on us.
EpictetusFormer slave turned Stoic teacher whose lectures still read like direct address.
Eric NewbyFunny accounts of amateur journeys, above all A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
Eric SchlosserFollowed fast food from the slaughterhouse to the counter, and nuclear weapons to the brink.
Erich FrommPsychoanalyst who argued that loving is a skill to be learned, and that freedom is something people are often eager to escape.
Erik LarsonWeaves true crime and history into narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel.
Erik WeihenmayerClimber who reached the summit of Everest blind, and writes about adversity without sentimentality.
Ernest BeckerArgued that the fear of death is the hidden engine of human culture.
Ernest HemingwayCut adjectives until the sentence itself did the feeling.
Ernest J. GainesBlack life in rural Louisiana, set in his invented town of Bayonne.
Erwin SchrödingerThe wave equation of quantum mechanics, the cat thought experiment and What Is Life?
Esmé Weijun WangSchizoaffective disorder from the inside, in The Collected Schizophrenias.
Esther DufloMade randomised field experiments the way to test what reduces poverty, set out in Poor Economics.
Esther PerelCouples therapist who writes about desire, infidelity and why security and passion pull in opposite directions.
Ethan HawkeAmerican actor, director and novelist, author of The Hottest State (1996), Ash Wednesday (2002) and A Bright Ray of Darkness (2021).
Etty HillesumYoung Jewish woman in occupied Amsterdam whose diary and letters survived her.
Eudora WeltyShort stories of small-town Mississippi and the Pulitzer-winning novel The Optimist's Daughter.
Eugenia GinzburgA two-volume memoir of Stalin’s purges and eighteen years in prison and the camps.
Eula BissEssays that connect her life to public questions, above all On Immunity.
Evan OsnosExplains China's boom and America's anger through the individuals living through them.
Evan ThompsonBrings cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy into one conversation about mind.
Evelyn UnderhillMade the history and practice of mysticism readable for general readers.
Evelyn WaughComic novels skewering 1920s English high society, like Decline and Fall, and Brideshead Revisited.
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F

F. Scott FitzgeraldWrote The Great Gatsby and the defining fiction of the Jazz Age, glamour and its cost.
Fernando PessoaWrote as dozens of invented poets, the heteronyms, each with a style of his own.
Flannery O'ConnorSouthern Gothic with teeth. Her stories corner you into a moral question you didn't see coming until it's too late to look away.
Florence AubenasFrench reporter who worked undercover as a cleaner to show the precarious France few see.
Fran LebowitzDry, opinionated essays about New York and modern manners.
Francis Ford CoppolaDirector of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now whose notebooks and books open up how he makes films.
Francis LucilleTeacher of Advaita Vedanta, or non-duality, in the line of Jean Klein.
Francisco CantúFormer Border Patrol agent who wrote a haunted memoir about the line he was paid to guard.
Francisco VarelaIntroduced autopoiesis to biology with Humberto Maturana, and the enactive view of mind.
Frank McCourtTurned a childhood of Irish poverty into a memoir that's somehow funny as often as it's bleak.
Frank O’HaraThe central poet of the New York School, writing fast, conversational poems about friends.
Frank WestermanDutch writer who turns a mystery, a gas cloud, a mountain, a stuffed man, into a journey of ideas.
Franz KafkaMade bureaucratic dread feel like the most natural thing in the world.
Frederick BuechnerFaith and doubt seen with a novelist’s eye, in fiction, memoir and short theology.
Frederick DouglassEscaped slavery in 1838 and became America's leading Black abolitionist, writer and orator.
Fredrik BackmanWarm, funny novels about grief, loneliness and small communities, starting with A Man Called Ove.
Freya StarkTravelled, often alone, through Persia, Arabia and Turkey and wrote about the people she met there.
Frida KahloPainted her own pain so directly that her diaries and letters read like extensions of the canvases.
Friedrich NietzschePhilosopher who wrote in hammer blows and aphorisms instead of arguments.
Fritjof CapraLinked modern physics with Eastern mysticism in The Tao of Physics.
Fyodor DostoevskyNovels that treat guilt, faith, and suffering as the actual plot, not the subtext.
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G

G. I. GurdjieffA teaching often called the Fourth Way.
Gabor MatéPhysician tracing addiction and illness back to childhood trauma, compassionately and without judgment.
Gabriel ByrneIrish actor and author of the memoir Walking with Ghosts (2020) and Pictures in My Head (1994).
Gabriel García MárquezNobel-winning Colombian novelist of magical realism, from One Hundred Years of Solitude to Love in the Time of Cholera.
Gabrielle UnionAmerican actor and author of the essay collections We're Going to Need More Wine (2017) and You Got Anything Stronger? (2021).
Gail HoneymanEleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, one of the best-selling British debuts of the 2010s.
GangajiAmerican teacher in the Advaita line of Ramana Maharshi and Papaji.
Garrison KeillorStoryteller of Lake Wobegon whose radio monologues and books gently mock and love small-town Minnesota.
Gary SnyderPoet of wilderness, Zen practice and living in one place, from Turtle Island on.
Gary ZukavFormer physics popularizer whose book on the soul made him a regular on Oprah's couch.
Gay TalesePioneer of narrative journalism who proved nonfiction could read like a short story.
Geert MakDutch historian who travels to the places where history happened and listens to those who remember.
Gene WilderAmerican actor, screenwriter and author of the memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger (2005) and three novels.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelA system in which reality and history unfold as the development of spirit.
George BerkeleyImmaterialism: physical things exist only as ideas perceived by minds.
George EliotWrote Middlemarch under a man's name and gave the Victorian novel its deepest sense of moral consequence.
George OrwellMade totalitarianism and doublespeak permanent fixtures of how we talk about power.
George PackerExplains America's long unravelling through the lives of a few ordinary citizens.
George PlimptonThe original participatory journalist, who played with professionals to write about what it felt like.
George SaundersShort stories that are funny, strange, and quietly devastating, often all at once.
George SteinerCritic who wrote across languages and disciplines about translation and culture.
Georges SimenonInspector Maigret of the Paris police, and short novels written at extraordinary speed.
Georgia O’KeeffePainter of flowers, bones and New Mexico desert, whose letters show the life behind the canvases.
Gilles DeleuzeA philosophy of difference and becoming, and concepts like the rhizome.
Gillian FlynnWrote Gone Girl and made the unreliable, unlikeable woman a bestseller.
Glennon DoyleMemoirist and activist whose Untamed asks women to stop performing and start trusting their own knowing.
Gloria SteinemJournalist and organiser who helped make second-wave feminism a household conversation.
Gottfried Wilhelm LeibnizDeveloped the calculus independently of Newton, and the philosophy of monads.
Graeme SimsionWrote a neurodivergent romantic lead with warmth instead of caricature.
Graham GreeneFaith, betrayal and moral grey zones in far-flung places.
Graham NortonIrish television presenter and author of the memoirs So Me and The Life and Loves of a He Devil and the novels Holding, A Keeper, Home Stretch, Forever Home and Frankie.
Gretchen RubinTurned her own experiments in happiness and habits into bestselling books.
Günter WallraffGermany's great undercover journalist, who became a Turkish labourer to expose how migrants were treated.
Gustave FlaubertMade the precise, impersonal realist novel into an art.
Gwendolyn BrooksPoet of Chicago's South Side, the first African American to win a Pulitzer, author of We Real Cool.
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H

HafizMaster of the Persian ghazal, whose poems of wine and love read as earthly and divine.
Hampton SidesNarrative historian of expeditions, manhunts and last stands.
Han KangNobel laureate whose spare, unsettling fiction confronts violence through the body.
Hannah ArendtCoined 'the banality of evil' while reporting on Eichmann's trial — philosophy forced to reckon with an actual courtroom.
Hanya YanagiharaLong, intense novels about friendship and damage, above all A Little Life.
Harper LeeWrote one novel that became a permanent fixture of how America teaches itself about race.
Harriet LernerWomen’s anger as a signal worth listening to.
Hart CraneThe Bridge (1930), a long modernist poem that turns Brooklyn Bridge into a symbol of America.
Haruki MurakamiSurreal, jazz-inflected fiction where the mundane and the uncanny share a kitchen table.
Harville HendrixDeveloped Imago couples therapy with Helen LaKelly Hunt and set it out in Getting the Love You Want.
Heather GudenkaufSmall-town Iowa suspense told from several points of view, starting with The Weight of Silence.
Heather McGheeThe Sum of Us: racism costs white Americans too.
Helen MacdonaldTrained a goshawk while grieving her father, and wrote the rare nature book that is also about loss.
Helen OyeyemiNovels and stories that rework fairy tales and folklore, most famously Snow White in Boy, Snow, Bird.
Henri BergsonDuration: time as we live it, a continuous flow that clock-time cannot measure.
Henri NouwenLoneliness, prayer and being loved by God, written with honesty about his own wounds.
Henrik IbsenNorwegian playwright whose slammed door at the end of A Doll's House can still be heard today.
Henry David ThoreauWent to the woods to live deliberately, and left behind the case for simplicity that every burnout generation rediscovers.
Henry JamesAmericans abroad, unspoken motives and sentences that circle a truth before they land on it.
Henry MarshBrain surgeon writing frankly about mistakes, doubts and hard decisions in the memoir Do No Harm.
Henry MillerAutobiographical novels about sex and poverty, like Tropic of Cancer, banned in the US for decades.
HeraclitusRiddling sayings arguing that the world is held together by change.
Herman MelvilleMoby-Dick, the whaling novel that found its audience only after his death.
Hermann HesseNovels of the search for self, from Siddhartha to Steppenwolf.
Hilary MantelBrought Thomas Cromwell to life in the Wolf Hall trilogy.
Hilton AlsEssays mixing memoir, criticism and portraiture, and New Yorker theatre criticism.
HomerThe name behind the Iliad and the Odyssey — the war and the long way home that almost every story still borrows from.
Howard ZinnAmerican history told from the side of ordinary people, workers and protesters.
Hubert Selby Jr.Unflinching novels of addiction and self-destruction among the poor of New York.
Hunter S. ThompsonPioneered gonzo journalism and put himself in the middle of every story he covered.
Hugh LaurieEnglish actor, comedian, musician and author of the comic thriller The Gun Seller (1996).
Huston SmithIntroduced millions of readers to the world’s religions as their believers see them.
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I

Iain McGilchristArgues that the brain’s two hemispheres attend to the world in different ways.
Ian FrazierNew Yorker humorist and reporter who has spent years walking the Great Plains, Siberia and the Bronx.
Ian McEwanPrecise English novels about one moment that changes everything, like Atonement.
Ian UrbinaWent to sea for years to document slavery, violence and lawlessness on the world's oceans.
Ibn ArabiAndalusian Sufi philosopher who taught that all things exist only through God’s being.
Ida TarbellPioneering investigative journalist whose History of the Standard Oil Company helped break up a monopoly.
Idries ShahBrought Sufi teaching stories, including the jokes of Mulla Nasrudin, to Western readers.
Imre KertészTurned his deportation to Auschwitz as a teenager into fiction.
Indra NooyiLed PepsiCo from 2006 to 2018 and tells her story of work, family and leadership in My Life in Full.
Ingmar BergmanSwedish director of film and theatre whose memoir The Magic Lantern is as searching as his films.
Iris ChangHistorian who forced the world to reckon with an atrocity it had mostly agreed to forget.
Iris MurdochPhilosopher-novelist who used fiction to stage her own moral arguments.
Irvin D. YalomBrought existential psychotherapy to general readers through true stories like Love's Executioner.
Isabel AllendeChilean storyteller of family sagas that run through her country’s history, from The House of the Spirits on.
Isabel WilkersonReframed the Great Migration and American caste with the patience of a historian and the eye of a novelist.
Issa RaeAmerican writer, actress and producer, creator of Insecure and author of the essay collection The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2015).
Italo CalvinoTurned fables, science and games of structure into fiction.
Italo SvevoA pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy.
Ivan DoigWrote Montana's ranch hands, sheepherders and schoolteachers into memoir and fiction, not cowboy myth.
Iyanla VanzantSpiritual self-help drawn from her own life, and host of Iyanla: Fix My Life on OWN.
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J

J. Anthony LukasDeeply reported nonfiction that tells a public crisis through private lives.
J. D. SalingerThe Catcher in the Rye, one of the most widely read American novels of the century.
J.D. VanceWrote Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of an Appalachian family that became a national argument.
Jack KerouacTyped On the Road on one long scroll and gave a restless generation its soundtrack.
Jack KornfieldBrought Theravada insight meditation to the West.
Jack LondonAdventure writer who tested his characters against nature, cold, and their own instincts.
Jacqueline NovogratzFounder of Acumen who writes about patient capital and the moral side of fighting poverty.
Jacques DerridaDeconstruction: close reading that shows how texts undo the oppositions they rest on.
Jada Pinkett SmithAmerican actress, talk-show host and author of the memoir Worthy (2023) and the children's book Girls Hold Up This World (2005).
Jakob BöhmeSelf-taught shoemaker whose visionary books on God, nature and the soul were banned in his town.
James AgeePoor Southern families and his own Knoxville childhood, written with a poet’s intensity.
James BaldwinWrites sentences that do the work of essays and essays that read like confession — none of it lets America off easy.
James BloodworthWent undercover in low-wage Britain, from an Amazon warehouse to a call centre.
James ClearTurned habit formation into a system small enough to actually follow.
James HillmanFounder of archetypal psychology, a “polytheistic” branch of Jungian thought.
James JoyceRebuilt Dublin in words, from Dubliners to the single day of Ulysses.
James McBrideMusician-novelist who writes about race in America with warmth, comedy, and National Book Award-winning nerve.
James MichenerWrote doorstop sagas that start with geology and end, centuries later, with the people living on top of it.
James Russell LowellSatirised the Mexican–American War in Yankee dialect in The Biglow Papers.
James ThurberNew Yorker humorist and cartoonist of Walter Mitty, unruly dogs and baffled modern men.
Jane AustenWrote marriage plots so precise they doubled as social criticism.
Jane FallonSharp, comic novels about women getting even, cleverly and satisfyingly.
Jane FondaAmerican actor and activist, two-time Academy Award winner, author of Jane Fonda's Workout Book (1981) and the memoir My Life So Far (2005).
Jane GoodallHer study of wild chimpanzees at Gombe, which showed that they make and use tools.
Jane HarperCrime novels where a remote Australian landscape shapes the case.
Jane HirshfieldPoet trained in Zen practice whose lines are as clear and exact as a struck bell.
Jane MayerInvestigative reporter who maps the money and secrets behind American power.
Janet MalcolmNew Yorker writer who questioned the ethics of journalism itself.
Janna LevinWrites about black holes, gravitational waves and the shape of the universe as literature.
Jason DeParleLong, immersive reporting on American poverty, welfare reform and migration, from American Dream on.
Jason FagoneRecovered the forgotten code breaker who hunted Nazi spies, from archive boxes nobody had opened.
Jay-ZAmerican rapper, businessman and author of Decoded (2010), written with dream hampton.
Jean GebserDescribed human consciousness as five structures, from the archaic to the integral.
Jean HatzfeldFrench reporter who let the survivors and killers of the Rwandan genocide speak at length.
Jean KleinOne of the most eloquent Western teachers of Advaita, or non-duality.
Jean RhysWomen alone and short of money in interwar Paris and London, and the first Mrs Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea.
Jean Shinoda BolenReads the gods and goddesses of Greek myth as Jungian archetypes in ordinary lives.
Jean-Paul SartreThe leading figure of French existentialism: people are “condemned to be free”.
Jeannette WallsWrote The Glass Castle, a memoir of growing up with nomadic, often homeless parents.
Jeff MayshJournalist who finds true stories so improbable they end up as films.
Jeff SharletWrites about belief and power in America, from a secretive Washington fellowship to today's rallies.
Jeffrey EugenidesNovels of adolescence, family and identity around Detroit, above all the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex.
Jen SinceroSelf-help with jokes and swearing in it, most of all You Are a Badass.
Jennette McCurdyFormer child star whose memoir title alone told you this wasn't a nostalgia piece.
Jennifer SeniorJournalist who wrote about what parenting does to parents, not just to children.
Jennifer WeinerFunny, popular novels about women's bodies, families and sisters, starting with Good in Bed.
Jenny OdellArtist-writer making the case for attention and doing nothing as acts of resistance.
Jenny OffillShort, fragmentary novels about marriage, parenthood and climate dread, like Dept. of Speculation.
Jeroen SmitDutch business journalist who reconstructed the fall of ABN AMRO from the inside.
Jerry SeinfeldAmerican stand-up comedian, co-creator of Seinfeld, author of SeinLanguage (1993) and Is This Anything? (2020).
Jesmyn WardTwo-time National Book Award winner writing about Black families on the Gulf Coast.
Jessica BruderLived among older Americans who travel in vans from seasonal job to seasonal job.
Jessica MitfordThe “Queen of the Muckrakers”, an aristocrat-turned-radical with a witty pen.
Jessica SimpsonAmerican singer, actress and businesswoman, author of the memoir Open Book (2020).
Jhumpa LahiriPulitzer winner writing about immigrants caught between two homes, who later chose to write in Italian.
Jia TolentinoNew Yorker essayist dissecting the internet, self-delusion, and the pressure to optimize everything.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRejected every guru role, including his own, to teach freedom from authority.
Jill LeovyExplains why so many murders of young Black men go unsolved, through one Los Angeles detective.
Jim HarrisonNovellas about appetite, the wild and the northern American landscape, above all Legends of the Fall.
Joan DidionMade personal grief and American unraveling sound like the same clear, cold sentence.
Joan TollifsonPlain, personal writing about nonduality and being present.
Joanna MacyJoins Buddhist thought and systems theory into a practice for facing ecological despair.
Jodi KantorInvestigative journalist whose reporting helped break open the #MeToo movement.
Jodi PicoultFamily dramas built around one moral dilemma and a courtroom.
Johann HariJournalist who argues that addiction, depression and lost focus are about connection, not just chemistry.
John BerendtTurned a real Savannah murder into a genre-defining true-crime narrative.
John BergerChanged how people look at images with Ways of Seeing.
John BowlbyPsychiatrist whose attachment theory reshaped how we understand a child's earliest bonds.
John CageMusic and writing shaped by chance, silence and Zen, from 4′33″ onwards.
John CarreyrouInvestigative reporter who took down a billion-dollar fraud one sourced fact at a time.
John CleeseEnglish actor, comedian and writer, co-founder of Monty Python, co-writer of Fawlty Towers and author of the memoir So, Anyway... (2014).
John Dos PassosNovels built from montage, mixing fictional lives with headlines and songs.
John GottmanDecades of research on couples, including the Love Lab.
John HerseyWrote Hiroshima, the 1946 account of six survivors of the atomic bomb.
John Howard GriffinDarkened his skin to travel the segregated South as a Black man in 1959 and wrote Black Like Me.
John IrvingNovelist of wrestlers, orphanages, and oddballs, whose sprawling plots keep circling back to grief and chance.
John Jeremiah SullivanEssayist who can take a reality show or a Christian rock festival and find the whole of America in it.
John KeatsEnglish Romantic poet who wrote the great odes of 1819 before dying at 25.
John Kennedy TooleWrote A Confederacy of Dunces, rejected in his lifetime and awarded the Pulitzer after his death.
John McPheeThe master of literary nonfiction, who can make geology, oranges and canoes utterly absorbing.
John MuirWrote about the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite and helped make the case for national parks.
John O’DonohueBrought Celtic spirituality and the Irish landscape to readers worldwide.
John of the CrossTurned his love poems into detailed guides to prayer and the inner life.
John RechyCity of Night (1963), one of the first bestselling American novels about gay life.
John SteinbeckFound the American epic in migrant workers and family farms — dignity written into people history mostly ignored.
John UpdikeChronicled American suburban life in the Rabbit novels and countless stories, with prose of rare precision.
John VaillantWrites about fire, tigers, and forests as forces with their own logic, and humans as the ones who forget it.
John WyndhamBritish master of the 'cosy catastrophe', from The Day of the Triffids to The Midwich Cuckoos.
Jojo MoyesWarm, funny, often heartbreaking novels built around a moral dilemma, above all Me Before You.
Jon Kabat-ZinnFounded MBSR in 1979 and brought meditation, without its religious framing, into hospitals.
Jon KrakauerNarrative journalist drawn to ambition and disaster at extreme altitude and beyond.
Jon McGregorNovels about ordinary communities after a disaster, told in inventive ways, as in Reservoir 13.
Jon MooallemJournalist drawn to strange corners of the natural world and the people trying to save them.
Jon RonsonFinds the strange, uncomfortable human story hiding inside every conspiracy or scandal.
Jonah BergerResearches word of mouth and why ideas catch on, summed up in the STEPPS framework of Contagious.
Jonathan FranzenBig American family novels, from The Corrections to Crossroads.
Jonathan HaidtA moral psychologist who explains why people believe what they believe, then turned that lens on what phones are doing to kids.
Jonathan SwiftThe sharpest satirist in English, writing behind invented narrators with a straight face.
Jonice WebbNamed Childhood Emotional Neglect: what parents fail to give can shape a life.
Jorge Luis BorgesShort, puzzle-like stories of infinite libraries, labyrinths and mirrors.
Joris LuyendijkDutch anthropologist-reporter who went among the bankers of the City of London and asked them how it works.
Joseph BrodskyRussian poet put on trial by the Soviet state in 1964 and expelled in 1972.
Joseph CampbellThe monomyth, or hero’s journey, which shaped how storytellers build stories.
Joseph ConradNovels of the sea, empire and political violence, written in his third language.
Joseph HellerWrote Catch-22, the Second World War satire whose title became a phrase for a rule you cannot win against.
Joseph MitchellNew Yorker writer who made the city’s oddballs and waterfronts unforgettable.
Joshua FoerTrained his memory for a year and ended up winning the national championship.
Joshua HuntInvestigative journalist who looks at what the sportswear industry hides behind its heroic image.
Juan RulfoTwo of the most influential books in Latin American literature, above all Pedro Páramo.
Judith HermanNamed complex PTSD and set out a three-stage model of recovery in Trauma and Recovery.
Julia CameronWrote The Artist’s Way, the twelve-week course behind millions of morning pages.
Julian BarnesShort, formally inventive novels about memory, love and death, above all The Sense of an Ending.
Julian JaynesArgued that human consciousness is learned through language and only about 3,000 years old.
Julian of NorwichRevelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving book in English attributed to a woman.
Julie AndrewsEnglish actress, singer and author of the memoirs Home (2008) and Home Work (2019) and many children's books, including The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974).
Julie K. BrownHer Miami Herald investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Jung ChangWild Swans, a family memoir of twentieth-century China banned in her home country.
Junichiro TanizakiDesire, obsession and the pull between Western modernity and traditional Japanese taste.
Junot DíazThe Dominican American experience in a voice of street English, Spanish and science fiction.
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K

K. Anders EricssonDeliberate practice: expert performance comes mainly from long, focused training.
KabirSharp couplets and songs that mock empty ritual and look for God within.
Kahlil GibranLebanese-American poet-painter whose The Prophet has been quietly passed from hand to hand for a century.
Kakuzō OkakuraExplained Japanese art and taste to Western readers in The Book of Tea.
Kareem Abdul-JabbarAmerican basketball player, six-time NBA champion, and author of memoirs, history books and the Mycroft Holmes mystery novels.
Karen RussellFiction that treats the impossible as everyday fact, from werewolf daughters to Swamplandia!
Karl MarlantesVietnam veteran who spent thirty years writing Matterhorn, the war novel he lived.
Karl Ove KnausgårdSix volumes of My Struggle, turning ordinary life into total recall.
Karyl McBrideThe lasting effects of maternal narcissism on daughters.
Kashmir HillBroke the story of the company that wants to put a name to every face.
Kate AtkinsonClever, funny novels that play with time, from Life After Life to the Jackson Brodie books.
Kate BeatonMade the history webcomic Hark! A Vagrant and Ducks, a graphic memoir of the Alberta oil sands.
Kate BowlerHistorian diagnosed with terminal cancer who writes against the lie that everything happens for a reason.
Kate ChopinWrote The Awakening, a novel about a married woman's inner freedom, condemned when it appeared in 1899.
Kate MillettSexual Politics (1970), which described patriarchy as a system of power.
Kate MooreTells the stories of women who fought back in court, starting with the poisoned Radium Girls.
Kate MortonLong dual-timeline mysteries about family secrets buried in old houses, like The Forgotten Garden.
Kate QuinnHistorical novels about women codebreakers, spies and snipers of the world wars.
Kate SummerscaleRecovers Victorian murders, scandals and hauntings from the archives and tells them like novels.
Katherine BooImmersive reporting from inside a Mumbai slum that reads with novelistic detail.
Katherine CenterWarm, character-driven fiction about people rebuilding after their lives fall apart.
Katherine GrahamPublisher who ran the Washington Post through Watergate and wrote her own reckoning with power.
Katherine MansfieldNew Zealand writer who reinvented the modern short story before dying at thirty-four.
Katherine MayMade 'wintering' a word for the fallow seasons everyone goes through but rarely names.
Kathleen JamiePoems and essays on the natural world and Scotland’s past.
Kathryn StockettWrote The Help, the bestselling and much-debated novel about Black maids in 1960s Mississippi.
Katy MilkmanResearches behaviour change, from temptation bundling to the fresh start effect, in How to Change.
Kay Redfield JamisonManic-depressive illness, as a leading researcher and from the inside.
Kazuo IshiguroNobel laureate whose narrators never quite tell you the whole truth, and that's the point.
Keith RichardsEnglish guitarist and songwriter, co-founder of the Rolling Stones, and author of the memoir Life (2010).
Keith WaterhouseBilly Liar and its daydreaming clerk.
Ken WilberIntegral theory, an attempt to bring knowledge from many fields together.
Kent HarufSpare, tender novels set in the small Colorado town of Holt.
Kenzaburo OeNobel-winning Japanese novelist who wrote about his disabled son, nuclear memory and the conscience of postwar Japan.
Kevin WilsonFiction that finds tenderness inside deeply strange family setups.
Khaled HosseiniAfghan-American novelist who made The Kite Runner a book about guilt that millions read in one sitting.
Kiese LaymonMississippi memoirist and novelist writing about bodies, debt and honesty in Heavy.
Kim GordonAmerican musician and artist, co-founder of Sonic Youth, and author of the memoir Girl in a Band (2015).
Kirk Wallace JohnsonFollowed a feather heist from a natural history museum into a world of obsession.
Kobo AbeSurreal novels of people who lose their place in society, above all The Woman in the Dunes.
Kristin HannahHistorical fiction that puts women at the center of wars usually told through men.
Kristin HarmelHistorical novelist who builds love and loss around little-known corners of the Second World War.
Kristin HershAmerican singer-songwriter, founder of Throwing Muses, and author of the memoirs Rat Girl (2010) and Seeing Sideways (2021).
Kristin NeffFounded the academic study of self-compassion and wrote Self-Compassion for general readers.
Kurt CobainJournals and lyrics that read like someone thinking out loud in real time, unfiltered and often unfinished on purpose.
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Kurt VonnegutSurvived the firebombing of Dresden and turned it into Slaughterhouse-Five, dark comedy with a moral core.

L

Lacy CrawfordMemoirist whose Notes on a Silencing exposed how an elite boarding school buried the assault of a student.
Langston HughesBrought the blues, jazz and everyday Black speech into American poetry.
Lao TzuLegendary author of the Tao Te Ching: 81 short chapters on yielding, simplicity and the way.
Larry McMurtryTexas novelist who wrote Lonesome Dove and took the romance out of the American West without killing it.
Laura HillenbrandWrote Seabiscuit and Unbroken, two survival stories told with novelistic momentum.
Lawrence WrightInvestigative journalism at its most patient — years spent inside a subject before a single sentence gets written.
Leah SottileReports on apocalyptic belief and violence in the American West.
Lena DunhamAmerican writer, director and actor, creator of Girls, and author of Not That Kind of Girl (2014) and Famesick (2026).
Leo TolstoyWrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then spent the rest of his life arguing with his own success.
Leonard CohenCanadian poet and novelist who became one of the most admired songwriters of his time.
Leslie JamisonEssayist who examines empathy, addiction, and pain without flinching or sentimentalizing either.
Leslie T. ChangFollowed young migrant women through the factory cities of southern China.
Lewis ThomasShort essays that turned cell biology into literature.
Liane MoriartyDomestic suspense where suburban secrets carry as much tension as any thriller.
Lieve JorisFlemish traveller who has spent decades living alongside the people of Congo, Africa and the Arab world.
Linda PolmanDutch journalist asking the uncomfortable question of what humanitarian aid really does in war.
Linda RonstadtAmerican singer and author of Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir (2013) and, with Lawrence Downes, Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands (2022).
Lindsay C. GibsonClinical psychologist who named what it's like to grow up with emotionally unavailable parents.
Lisa GenovaNovels about neurological illness from the inside, starting with Still Alice on early-onset Alzheimer's.
Lisa JewellTwisty domestic thrillers built on families with something they're not saying.
Lisa SeeWrites historical fiction about Chinese women's lives, their friendships, and the traditions that bind them.
Lisa WingateHistorical novels about forgotten episodes of American history, above all Before We Were Yours.
Liz MooreNovelist whose literary crime stories care more about families and addiction than about the twist.
Liza MundyRecovered the forgotten women behind American code breaking and intelligence.
Lori GottliebPsychotherapist who wrote openly about being in therapy herself.
Louis TherouxDocumentary maker whose memoir and books follow his polite, patient way of getting strangers to open up.
Louise BourgeoisSculptor whose diaries, writings and interviews trace how memory and childhood shaped a lifetime of art.
Louise ErdrichOjibwe novelist whose interlinked books map families across North Dakota.
Louise GlückNobel laureate poet whose spare lines carry enormous emotional weight.
Lucius Annaeus SenecaStoic philosopher whose letters read like advice from a very calm, very blunt friend.
Lucy FoleyClosed-circle murder mysteries in remote places.
Lucy GrealyLiving with a face changed by childhood cancer and surgery.
Ludwig WittgensteinChanged his own philosophy of language twice, from picture theory to language games.
Luis Alberto UrreaWrites the US-Mexico border from both sides, in reportage, novels and poetry.
Lulu MillerWhy Fish Don't Exist turns a forgotten fish taxonomist's life into a memoir about chaos and order.
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Madeleine L'EngleWrote A Wrinkle in Time and trusted children with physics, faith, and real darkness.
Madeline MillerRetells Greek myths through characters at the edge of the story, in The Song of Achilles and Circe.
Maeve BinchyIrish storyteller whose novels turn small towns into entire, fully lived-in worlds.
Maggie NelsonBlends memoir, theory, and poetry into books that resist being filed under one genre.
Maharishi Mahesh YogiBrought Transcendental Meditation to the West and taught the Beatles in Rishikesh.
Mahatma GandhiTurned nonviolent resistance into a political strategy that outlasted the empire it opposed.
Malcolm GladwellPopularized the idea that the small, overlooked factor is usually the real explanation.
Marcus AureliusRoman emperor whose private notebook, the Meditations, became the most-read handbook of Stoic philosophy.
Margalit FoxFormer obituary writer who turns forgotten lives and cracked codes into detective stories.
Margaret AtwoodWrote The Handmaid's Tale and a whole shelf of fiction that keeps turning out to be prophecy.
Margaret Fuller19th-century critic and feminist whose writing argued women into the American intellectual conversation.
Margaret MeadMade anthropology a public subject in America with Coming of Age in Samoa.
Marge PiercyFeminist poet and novelist whose Woman on the Edge of Time imagines a future worth fighting for.
Margery AllinghamGolden Age crime writer whose Albert Campion mysteries mix wit, atmosphere and London fog.
Marguerite DurasSpare, haunted novels of desire and memory, above all The Lover.
Marguerite PoreteThe Mirror of Simple Souls, on the soul’s “annihilation” in God through love.
Maria PopovaBehind The Marginalian, she reads like she's building a cathedral out of other people's best thinking, one essay at a time.
Maria SempleSharp comic novels about clever, overwhelmed women.
Mariah CareyAmerican singer, songwriter and author of the memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey (2020), written with Michaela Angela Davis.
Marian KeyesIrish fiction that handles addiction and heartbreak with genuine, warm comedy.
Marianne WilliamsonSpiritual teacher who brought A Course in Miracles to millions with A Return to Love.
Marie-Louise von FranzCarl Jung’s closest collaborator, known for her readings of fairy tales.
Marilynne RobinsonGrace, faith and small-town Iowa in the Gilead novels.
Marina AbramovićLong, demanding performances that make the audience part of the work.
Marion WoodmanBrought Jungian psychology to the feminine, addiction and the body.
Marjane SatrapiPersepolis, a graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution.
Mark BowdenJournalist behind Black Hawk Down, reconstructing battles and manhunts minute by minute.
Mark EpsteinBrings Buddhist meditation and Western psychotherapy into conversation.
Mark LaneganSinger of Screaming Trees and memoirist of his addiction years.
Mark TwainAmerica’s great humorist, and the river-boy voice of Huckleberry Finn.
Marshall RosenbergBuilt an entire framework, Nonviolent Communication, out of the simple idea that most conflict is an unmet need in disguise.
Martha BeckHarvard-trained sociologist turned life coach who writes about leaving the life you were told to want.
Martha C. NussbaumThe capabilities approach to justice, and emotions as intelligent judgements.
Martha GrahamDancer and choreographer who made modern dance a theatre of myth and inner life.
Martha Hall KellyHistorical novelist who builds stories around real women in the Second World War, starting with Lilac Girls.
Martin AmisWrote dazzling, savage comic novels about money, London and the twentieth century, and brilliant essays and criticism.
Martin BuberThe philosophy of dialogue: we become fully human in the meeting of I and You.
Martin HeideggerBeing and Time (1927), one of the most influential works of twentieth-century philosophy.
Martin Luther King Jr.Led the civil rights movement through nonviolent protest and wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Martin ScorseseFilmmaker whose writing on cinema is as obsessive and precise as the films themselves.
Martin ShortCanadian comedian and actor known for SCTV, Saturday Night Live and Only Murders in the Building, and author of the memoir I Must Say (2014).
Mary KarrMemoirist whose Texas childhood became a blueprint for how the genre could sound.
Mary MidgleyArgued that humans are animals with a real nature, and attacked science used as religion.
Mary OliverPoet who made close attention to nature feel like a spiritual practice.
Mary RoachScience writer who finds the funniest, strangest angle on the human body and never looks away.
Mary ShelleyWrote Frankenstein at nineteen and accidentally invented science fiction while grieving — the monster was never really the monster.
Mary WollstonecraftArgued in 1792 that women only seem lesser because they are denied an education.
Mary-Louise ParkerAmerican actress, two-time Tony Award winner, and author of the memoir Dear Mr. You (2015).
Mathew KnowlesMusic manager turned memoirist, writing candidly about ambition, family, and the machinery behind building a dynasty.
Matsuo BashōThe master of haiku, and the travel journal Oku no Hosomichi.
Matt HaigWrites about depression and hope with a directness that doesn't flinch from either.
Matt TaibbiRolling Stone reporting on Wall Street after the 2008 crash, collected in Griftopia, and the Twitter Files.
Matthew DesmondSociologist who followed families through eviction to show how poverty actually works in America.
Matthew McConaugheyActor whose memoir Greenlights mixes road stories, diary entries and homespun philosophy.
Matthew PerryAmerican-Canadian actor, known as Chandler Bing on Friends, and author of the memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (2022).
Matthieu RicardScientist turned Buddhist monk who writes about happiness and altruism.
Maurice Merleau-PontyMade the lived, perceiving body the starting point of philosophy.
Maxine Hong KingstonThe Woman Warrior, mixing memoir, myth and her mother’s stories.
Maya AngelouTurned autobiography into something closer to scripture — pain and grace sitting in the same sentence without contradiction.
Meg MasonMental illness, marriage and family with a humour writer’s timing, in Sorrow and Bliss.
Megan TwoheyInvestigative reporter whose work helped bring down Harvey Weinstein.
Meister EckhartPreached about detachment and God born in the soul.
Mel RobbinsSimple, named techniques for changing behaviour, from the five-second rule to The Let Them Theory.
Melissa FebosEssayist writing about addiction, sex work, and desire with unusual candor.
Merlin SheldrakeEntangled Life shows how fungi shape life on Earth, from networks under forests to the yeast in bread.
Michael A. SingerTeaches that you are not the voice in your head but the one who hears it.
Michael FinkelNarrative journalist drawn to people who disappear from the world on purpose.
Michael HerrWrote Dispatches, the Vietnam reportage that made war journalism sound like a fever dream.
Michael J. FoxCanadian-American actor, author and Parkinson's research advocate; author of Lucky Man (2002) and Future Boy (2025).
Michael LewisFinds the human story hiding inside a financial system built to be boring.
Michael PalinEnglish comedian, actor, travel writer and diarist, a member of Monty Python and author of Around the World in 80 Days (1989) and Erebus (2018).
Michael PaternitiLong-form writer drawn to strange quests, from Einstein's brain to a Spanish cheese.
Michael PollanFood and plant writer who asks what we eat, why we eat it, and what it does to our minds.
Michel de MontaigneInvented the essay, writing about himself and his doubts as a way of thinking about everything else.
Michel FoucaultHistories of madness, prisons and sexuality, like Discipline and Punish, on how knowledge and power work.
Michelle McNamaraTrue crime writer who died before catching the killer she'd spent years hunting.
Michelle ObamaFormer First Lady whose memoir Becoming traces her road from Chicago's South Side to the White House.
Michelle WilliamsDestiny’s Child singer, solo artist and Broadway performer who writes about mental health.
Michelle ZaunerCrying in H Mart, a memoir of her Korean mother's death told through food, from Japanese Breakfast's singer.
Mieko KawakamiFrank, often funny novels about women’s bodies and class in Japan, above all Breasts and Eggs.
Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiNamed and studied flow, the state of complete absorption in a challenge.
Mike TysonAmerican boxer, the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and author of Undisputed Truth (2013) and Iron Ambition (2017).
Mikhail BulgakovThe Master and Margarita, Satan in Stalin’s Moscow, written in secret.
Miki KashtanApplies Nonviolent Communication to groups and social change, and created Convergent Facilitation.
Milan KunderaLove stories, politics and philosophy, above all The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Min Jin LeeNovelist of the Korean diaspora whose sweeping family stories made Pachinko a modern classic.
Mindy KalingAmerican writer, actor and producer, writer on The Office and creator of The Mindy Project, author of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (2011) and Why Not Me? (2015).
MirabaiDevotional songs to Krishna, whom she worshipped as her divine lover.
Mircea EliadeShowed how religious people divide the world into sacred and profane space and time.
Mitch AlbomTurns big life lessons into slim, sentimental books people actually finish.
Miyamoto MusashiJapanese swordsman undefeated in over sixty duels, author of The Book of Five Rings on strategy.
Molly RingwaldAmerican actress, writer and translator, author of Getting the Pretty Back (2010) and When It Happens to You (2012).
MoojiTeaches self-inquiry in the Advaita tradition of Ramana Maharshi and Papaji.
MorrisseyEnglish singer and lyricist of the Smiths, author of Autobiography (2013) and the novel List of the Lost (2015).
Muhammad YunusEconomist who built microcredit from a personal loan into a Nobel-winning model.
Muriel SparkShort, sly, merciless novels; Miss Jean Brodie is only the beginning.
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N

N. K. JemisinWon the Hugo for Best Novel three years running, once for each book of the Broken Earth trilogy.
Nadia Bolz-WeberStand-up comic turned Lutheran pastor, writing frank, funny memoirs about grace and addiction.
Nadine Burke HarrisPediatrician who connected childhood trauma to lifelong physical health outcomes.
NagarjunaFounded the Madhyamaka, or Middle Way, school of Buddhist philosophy.
Nan ShepherdThe Living Mountain, her study of the Cairngorms.
Nancy L. SegalPsychologist studying twins to untangle nature from nurture.
Naomi AldermanNovelist who asks what happens when power changes hands, most famously in The Power.
Naomi KleinJournalist who traces how crises are used to push through policies nobody voted for.
Nassim Nicholas TalebFormer trader who writes about luck, risk and the rare events nobody plans for.
Natalia GinzburgFamily life, marriage and Fascist Italy in a plain, conversational voice, above all in Family Lexicon.
Nate SilverFounded FiveThirtyEight and writes about probability and prediction in The Signal and the Noise.
Nathaniel PhilbrickTurns American history into page-turners, starting with the whaleship Essex.
Nedra Glover TawwabTeaches boundaries in plain language, above all in Set Boundaries, Find Peace.
Neil deGrasse TysonExplains astrophysics to a mass audience, from the Hayden Planetarium to Cosmos.
Neil YoungCanadian-American singer-songwriter and author of Waging Heavy Peace (2012), Special Deluxe (2014) and To Feel the Music (2019).
Nella LarsenHarlem Renaissance novelist who wrote about mixed-race women.
Nellie BlyFaked her way into an asylum to expose it from the inside — the original blueprint for undercover investigative journalism.
Nelson MandelaLed the struggle against apartheid, spent 27 years in prison and wrote Long Walk to Freedom.
Ngaio MarshNew Zealand crime writer of the Golden Age whose Inspector Alleyn novels draw on her life in the theatre.
Niccolò MachiavelliArgued in The Prince that politics has its own rules apart from conventional morality.
Nicholas D. KristofColumnist reporting from the world's hardest places, insisting readers keep looking.
Nicholson BakerTurns tiny moments, an escalator ride, a shoelace, into whole books, and also writes fierce nonfiction about libraries and war.
Nick CaveA songwriter whose prose carries the same weight as his lyrics — grief, faith, and tenderness refusing to stay separate.
Nick DaviesExposed phone hacking at the News of the World for The Guardian and told the story in Hack Attack.
Nikki GiovanniPoet of the Black Arts Movement, best known for Nikki-Rosa and the Virginia Tech memorial poem.
Nikolai GogolThe comic and grotesque founder of the Russian prose tradition.
Nina RiggsThe Bright Hour, a frank and often funny memoir of living with terminal cancer as a young mother.
Nisargadatta MaharajBombay shopkeeper and Advaita teacher of I Am That.
Nishida KitarōFounded modern Japanese philosophy and the Kyoto School around pure experience.
Nishitani KeijiBrought Zen into dialogue with Nietzsche and Heidegger to answer modern nihilism.
Nora EphronTurned her own life into comic essays and the novel Heartburn, and wrote When Harry Met Sally.
Norman MacleanWrote one perfect book late in life: a family, a river and fly-fishing in Montana.
Norman MailerCombative, self-mythologizing writer of the New Journalism era.
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O

Ocean VuongPoet-novelist whose sentences carry the weight of war, family, and queerness at once.
Octavia E. ButlerScience fiction about power, survival and the future of race, from Kindred to the Parable books.
Octavio PazMexican poet and essayist who examined Mexican identity and the nature of poetry.
Olga TokarczukNobel-winning Polish novelist of fragments, journeys and moral fables, from Flights to The Books of Jacob.
Oliver BurkemanMakes peace with mortality and limited time instead of trying to optimize around it.
Oliver SacksA neurologist who wrote about his patients like short stories, finding wonder in the brain's strangest malfunctions.
Olivia LaingReads private experience, like loneliness or drinking, through other artists' lives, as in The Lonely City.
Orlando FigesNarrative histories of Russia, from the revolution to private life under Stalin.
Óscar MartínezSalvadoran reporter who rode La Bestia with migrants and covers Central America's violence from within.
Oscar WildeWit sharp enough to survive over a century unblunted, wrapped around ideas about beauty, hypocrisy, and self-invention.
OshoProvocative Indian mystic whose talks fill hundreds of books on meditation and freedom.
Ottessa MoshfeghNarrators who are hard to like and harder to stop reading, as in My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
Owen BarfieldTraced the evolution of consciousness through the history of words.
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P

P. D. JamesThe Adam Dalgliesh detective novels set inside modern British institutions, and The Children of Men.
P. D. OuspenskyWrote on the fourth dimension and higher consciousness, and on Gurdjieff’s teaching.
P.J. O'RourkeLibertarian political satire built on first-hand reporting, as in Parliament of Whores.
Pablo NerudaLove poetry, and Canto General, his epic of Latin America.
Pamela AndersonCanadian-American actor, model, activist and author of the memoir Love, Pamela (2023), the novels Star and Star Struck, and the cookbook I Love You.
Paramahansa YoganandaBrought yoga and meditation to the West; wrote Autobiography of a Yogi.
Parker PalmerWrites about vocation and integrity as the same question asked twice.
ParmenidesA single poem arguing that what truly is cannot change or pass away.
Patricia EvangelistaCounted the dead of the Philippine drug war, one killing and one family at a time.
Patricia HighsmithMade readers root for Tom Ripley, and wrote Carol under another name.
Patrick Radden KeefeInvestigative writer who turns years of reporting into definitive, propulsive nonfiction.
Patrick SymmesAdventure journalist who retraced Che Guevara's motorcycle route through Latin America.
Patti SmithPunk poet whose memoir of 1970s New York with Robert Mapplethorpe won the National Book Award.
Paul GrahamStartup essayist whose plain-spoken advice shaped a generation of founders.
Paul KalanithiA neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal cancer who wrote his way toward what makes a life worth living, right up until he couldn't.
Paul McCartneyEnglish singer, songwriter and member of the Beatles and Wings, author of The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021) and Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run (2025).
Paul NewmanAmerican actor, philanthropist and co-founder of Newman's Own, whose memoir The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man was published in 2022.
Paul TherouxLong overland journeys, mostly by train, written up as opinionated travel books like The Great Railway Bazaar.
Paul ToughReports from inside schools on character, childhood stress and inequality, as in How Children Succeed.
Pema ChodronBuddhist nun who teaches how to stay with fear and difficulty.
Percival EverettSatirist whose novels, James among them, turn American stories about race inside out.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyEnglish Romantic poet and radical who wrote about liberty, love and imagination.
Peter A. LevineTrauma therapist behind Somatic Experiencing and the idea that the body holds what the mind forgets.
Peter AckroydWrites London as a living thing whose past keeps breaking into the present.
Peter Godfrey-SmithPhilosopher who goes diving with octopuses to ask where minds come from.
Peter GuralnickBiographer of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips.
Peter HesslerLives for years in the places he writes about, from a Yangtze river town to revolutionary Cairo.
Peter KingsleyArgues that Parmenides was a priest of Apollo and a healer-prophet.
Peter MatthiessenWild places and the people at their edges, in fiction and nonfiction such as The Snow Leopard.
Peter PomerantsevWorked inside Russian television and became one of the sharpest guides to modern propaganda.
Peter ThielCo-founder of PayPal and Palantir whose Zero to One is a contrarian handbook on startups and monopoly.
Peter WohllebenPopularised the idea that trees communicate and care for each other.
Phil KnightCo-founded Nike and told its early story in Shoe Dog.
Philip GoffA leading contemporary defender of panpsychism.
Philip GourevitchWrote the essential account of the Rwandan genocide and the world's failure to stop it.
Philip K. DickScience fiction where reality proves unreliable and human and machine blur, from Do Androids Dream on.
Philip KapleauTrained for years in Japanese Zen monasteries and brought it home in The Three Pillars of Zen.
Philip RothSex, Jewishness and American history in novels that never stopped provoking.
Philipp MeyerThe Son, a Pulitzer-finalist saga of one Texas family.
Philippa PerryTranslates psychotherapy for everyone, above all on how parents and children relate.
Philippe PetitWalked a wire between the Twin Towers and wrote about it like a heist and a love letter at once.
Pico IyerTravel writer who ended up making the case for stillness and going nowhere.
Pierre HadotShowed that ancient philosophy was practised as a way of life.
PlatoThe dialogues, led by Socrates, that founded much of Western philosophy.
PlotinusFounded Neoplatonism, built around a single first principle, the One.
Polly ToynbeeGuardian columnist who took low-paid jobs to show how hard work stopped paying in Britain.
PrinceAmerican singer, songwriter and musician (1958–2016), known for Purple Rain (1984), and author of 21 Nights (2008) and the posthumous memoir The Beautiful Ones (2019).
Prince HarryMember of the British royal family, younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, and author of the memoir Spare (2023).
Pseudo-Dionysius the AreopagiteA God approached through negation, into “divine silence, darkness, and unknowing”.
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Q

Quentin TarantinoDirector who turned his love of cinema into a novel and a book of film criticism, Cinema Speculation.
QuestloveAmerican drummer, DJ, filmmaker and author, co-founder of the Roots, author of Mo' Meta Blues (2013), Music Is History (2021) and Hip-Hop Is History (2024).

R

R. D. LaingArgued that schizophrenia can be understood as a response to family life.
Rabia al-AdawiyyaEarly woman renunciant of Basra, credited with first teaching the love of God in Sufism.
Rabindranath TagoreBengali poet and songwriter, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Rachel AvivWrites about mental illness and diagnosis with rare patience for ambiguity.
Rachel CarsonMarine biologist whose Silent Spring started the modern environmental movement.
Rachel CuskNovelist whose narrator mostly listens, and whose books are built out of other people's stories.
Rachel HollisMotivational speaker whose Girl, Wash Your Face urged women to take responsibility for their own happiness.
Rachel JoyceQuiet, hopeful novels about ordinary people taking one unexpected step, like Harold Fry's long walk.
Rachel Louise SnyderInvestigates domestic violence until the warning signs everyone missed become impossible to ignore.
Rachel MonroeAsks why women love true crime, through four women whose lives crime reshaped.
Rainer Maria RilkePoet whose letters to a young writer are still the gentlest advice about solitude and art.
Ralph EllisonWrote Invisible Man, about a Black man American society refuses to see, then spent decades on a second novel.
Ralph Waldo EmersonAmerican essayist of self-reliance and the founding voice of transcendentalism.
Ram DassHarvard psychologist turned spiritual teacher; author of Be Here Now.
RamakrishnaNineteenth-century Bengali mystic whose recorded sayings teach that all paths lead to the same God.
Ramana MaharshiA sage whose entire teaching reduces to a single question — who am I — asked with more patience than most people can bear.
Rania AbouzeidReported Syria's war from inside the country, through a handful of Syrians followed for years.
Ray BradburyWrote Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, science fiction full of small-town longing.
Ray DalioFounded the hedge fund Bridgewater and set out its management rules in Principles.
Raynor WinnThe Salt Path, walking the South West Coast Path with her husband Moth.
Rebecca ElsonAstronomer-poet whose verse turned cosmology into intimate, mortal language.
Rebecca SklootTracked down the family behind the cells that changed modern medicine, without their consent.
Rebecca SolnitEssays that wander from hope to feminism to walking itself, always arriving somewhere sharper than where they started.
Rebecca WestJoined fiction, travel, history and courtroom reporting in one career.
Rebecca YarrosRomantasy author whose dragon-riding series became an unavoidable publishing phenomenon.
Reshma SaujaniFounded Girls Who Code and wrote Brave, Not Perfect on how girls are raised to be perfect.
Resmaa MenakemTherapist arguing that racialized trauma lives in the body, not just the headlines.
Richard BachPilot and writer whose little parable of a seagull who wanted to fly faster became a 1970s phenomenon.
Richard BrautiganShort, comic and melancholy books like Trout Fishing in America, central to the 1960s counterculture.
Richard E. GrantBritish actor, born in Swaziland, author of the film diaries With Nails (1996) and the memoir A Pocketful of Happiness (2022).
Richard FeynmanNobel physicist whose stories about safecracking and bongo drums made science look like play.
Richard FeynmanNobel physicist of quantum electrodynamics with a gift for telling stories.
Richard FordFollowed the New Jersey sportswriter Frank Bascombe through five books, from The Sportswriter on.
Richard H. ThalerA founder of behavioural economics and co-author of Nudge, with a Nobel prize in 2017.
Richard OsmanCreated the Thursday Murder Club, cosy crime with sharp jokes and real feeling about growing old.
Richard RhodesThe history of nuclear weapons, from the first experiments to the Cold War.
Richard RohrTeaches contemplative, non-dual Christianity in the Franciscan tradition.
Richard RussoTender, funny novels about declining small towns and the people who stay, above all Empire Falls.
Richard TarnasA one-volume history of Western thought that ends in a call to reconnect mind and cosmos.
Richard WrightBlack American life under Jim Crow and in the northern cities, written with anger.
Richard YatesUnsentimental fiction about the disappointed hopes of middle-class Americans.
Rick HansonJoins neuroscience and contemplative practice into simple methods for building inner strength.
Rick RubinA legendary producer who wrote about creativity as a spiritual practice rather than a formula — quiet, almost monk-like.
Roald DahlChildren's books in which children outwit cruel adults, like Matilda, and twist-ending stories for grown-ups.
Rob LoweAmerican actor and author of the memoirs Stories I Only Tell My Friends (2011) and Love Life (2014).
Robert BlyPlain, image-led poems of rural Minnesota, and translations of poets from around the world.
Robert CaroSpent decades on a single biography of Robert Moses and then decades more on LBJ — patience as a literary genre.
Robert CialdiniPsychologist who catalogued the principles of persuasion that marketers have leaned on ever since.
Robert D. KaplanReports from the world's trouble spots, from Balkan Ghosts on, arguing that geography shapes states.
Robert FrostPoems of rural New England in the rhythms of everyday American speech.
Robert GreeneMines history for lessons on power, seduction and mastery.
Robert KolkerNarrative nonfiction about families under extraordinary, often invisible strain.
Robert KursonWrites true adventure stories about divers, astronauts, and obsessives chasing one impossible thing.
Robert LowellTurned American poetry towards open autobiography with Life Studies, the start of confessional poetry.
Robert MacfarlaneWrites about walking, landscape and the words we have for them.
Robert MusilThe Man Without Qualities, an unfinished novel of Vienna before the First World War.
Robert SapolskyStress, baboons and the brain, and the case against free will in Behave and Determined.
Robert WalserShort, digressive prose about walkers, clerks and servants that Kafka admired.
Robert WrightExplains human nature, religion and meditation through evolutionary psychology.
Roberto CalassoPublisher who shaped Adelphi for six decades and retold the world’s myths.
Roberto SavianoExposed the Camorra from the inside, and has lived under police protection ever since.
Robin Wall KimmererPlants seen through scientific and Indigenous knowledge side by side.
Robinson JeffersStark poems of the California coast and “inhumanism”, a turn from humanity to the natural world.
Robyn DavidsonCrossed the Australian desert with camels and turned it into a classic of solo travel writing.
Roger EbertPulitzer-winning film critic who wrote about movies, and about life and illness, with warmth and clarity.
Rohinton MistryLong, closely observed novels about families in Bombay living through political upheaval.
Rollo MayBrought existential philosophy into American therapy, arguing that anxiety, faced, is part of growth.
Ron ChernowLong, archive-based biographies of American founders and financiers, including Alexander Hamilton.
Ron RashNovels and stories set in the southern Appalachians of the Carolinas.
Ron SuskindPulitzer-winning chronicler of power in Washington, who also wrote about reaching his autistic son through Disney films.
Ronan FarrowInvestigative reporting that helped break open #MeToo, written with the doggedness of someone who wouldn't be talked out of it.
Rory StewartWalked across Afghanistan and later wrote from inside the politics he once observed.
Rose GeorgeTakes subjects nobody wants to think about, toilets, shipping, blood, and makes them unforgettable.
Ross GayPoet and essayist who treats delight as something worth studying closely.
Roxane GayCultural critic and memoirist who writes about the body, feminism, and contradiction without smoothing any of it over.
Ruby WaxAmerican-British comedian, broadcaster and mental health campaigner, author of Sane New World (2013) and I'm Not As Well As I Thought I Was (2023).
RumiPersian Sufi poet of longing for God, whose Masnavi is a central work of Persian literature.
Rupert SheldrakeMorphic resonance: the idea that nature has a kind of memory.
Rupert SpiraFormer potter who teaches the Direct Path of non-duality, that all experience is made of awareness.
Rutger BregmanArgues, with historical examples, that most people are decent.
Ruth KlügerSurvived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz as a child and wrote a memoir that refuses easy consolation.
Ruth ReichlFood writer and former Gourmet editor whose memoirs are as much about family and appetite as about restaurants.
Ruth RendellWrote the Inspector Wexford mysteries and, as Barbara Vine, darker psychological novels of guilt and obsession.
Ryan HolidayBrings Stoic philosophy to modern readers in short, practical books.
RyōkanPoor hermit-monk of the snow country who wrote simple, playful poems.
Ryszard KapuścińskiForeign correspondent whose reporting from the world's collapses reads like literature.
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S

SadhguruIndian yogi and founder whose teachings on inner engineering reach a massive modern audience.
Sally FieldAmerican actress, two-time Academy Award winner, and author of the memoir In Pieces (2018).
Sally RooneyFiction about millennial intimacy, class, and the things people can't quite say to each other.
Salman RushdieMagic realist of India and migration, from Midnight’s Children to Knife.
Sam HarrisArgues that religious faith should be open to the same criticism as any other belief.
Sam QuinonesTraced America's opioid epidemic from the pill mills to the Mexican villages that supplied the heroin.
Samantha IrbyFrank, very funny essays about chronic illness, sex, money and the body, from We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
Samantha PowerPulitzer-winning writer and diplomat whose A Problem from Hell asks why the world keeps failing to stop genocide.
Samuel BeckettStripped drama and fiction down to voices waiting and failing to stop talking, above all in Waiting for Godot.
Sarah PolleyFilmmaker whose memoir confronts memory, trauma, and the stories families tell about themselves.
Sarah SilvermanAmerican comedian, actor and writer, author of the memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee (2010).
Sarah SmarshWrites about rural, working-poor America from inside it, above all in Heartland, set in Kansas.
Sarah VowellHistorian-essayist who makes American history funny without making it less serious.
Sarah WatersVictorian and 1940s London, rewritten through women’s lives and secrets, with twists you don’t see coming.
Sarah WeinmanWorks where true crime meets literary history, from the real Lolita to a killer who charmed his way out.
Saul BellowNobel laureate of restless, talkative Jewish-American heroes in Chicago and New York.
Sayaka MurataShort, deadpan fiction questioning what society calls normal, above all Convenience Store Woman.
Sebastian JungerWar correspondent writing about danger, brotherhood, and what peace takes from soldiers.
Selma BlairAmerican actor and author of the memoir Mean Baby: A Memoir of Growing Up (2022).
Serhii PlokhyNarrative histories of the end of the Soviet Union, the nuclear age and Ukraine.
Seth GodinArgues that marketing works when it is remarkable and aimed at people who care, from Purple Cow on.
Shane BauerWorked as a guard in a private prison to show what American incarceration looks like inside.
Sharon OldsCandid, physical poems about family, sex and the body.
Sharon SalzbergMeditation teacher who made loving-kindness practice plain, practical and open to beginners.
Sharon Strand EllisonCreated Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, set out in Taking the War Out of Our Words.
Shelby Van PeltDebut novelist who gave part of her story to a grumpy giant Pacific octopus, and made it work.
Sheri FinkPhysician-journalist who reconstructed the life-and-death choices made in a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina.
Sherry TurkleHow computers, robots and phones change the way people think about themselves.
Sheryl SandbergFacebook COO whose Lean In argues that women should pursue leadership at work.
Sheryl WuDunnJournalist documenting the global oppression, and resilience, of women and girls.
Shunmyō MasunoSōtō Zen priest and garden designer who writes short books on calm, simple living.
Shunryu SuzukiBrought Soto Zen to American students, founded San Francisco Zen Center and wrote Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Siddhartha MukherjeeOncologist who wrote a biography of cancer, and then one of the gene.
Sidney PoitierBahamian-American actor, director, diplomat and author of This Life (1980) and The Measure of a Man (2000); the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Sigrid NunezShort, plain-spoken novels about grief and friendship, narrated by women writers in New York.
Simon WinchesterTells the story behind dictionaries, maps, volcanoes and the people obsessed with them.
Simone de BeauvoirPhilosopher whose The Second Sex asked how one becomes a woman.
Simone WeilIdeas of attention, affliction and rootedness, in notebooks published after her death as Gravity and Grace.
Sinéad O’ConnorIrish singer-songwriter, known for Nothing Compares 2 U (1990), and author of the memoir Rememberings (2021).
Sōetsu YanagiFounded the mingei movement, praising plain, useful things made by anonymous craftspeople.
Sohaila AbdulaliWrites about rape and recovery with clarity and humour, rejecting the idea that survivors are ruined.
Sokei AnThe first Zen master to settle in America, teaching Rinzai Zen in New York from 1930.
Sonia FaleiroSpends years inside hidden Indian worlds, from Mumbai's dance bars to a village courtroom.
Sonia NazarioRode the freight trains through Mexico to tell one Honduran boy's journey north.
Sonia ShahJournalist tracing pandemics, malaria, and migration back to the ecological damage behind them.
Sophia AmorusoFounded the fashion retailer Nasty Gal and wrote #GIRLBOSS, a memoir for young female founders.
Sophy RobertsTravelled across Siberia in search of pianos, and found the history of a continent.
Søren KierkegaardWrote philosophy as invented authors, putting choice, anxiety and faith at the centre, as in Fear and Trembling.
Sri MIndian yogi whose memoir describes a spiritual journey from Kerala to the Himalayas.
Stanislav GrofPsychiatrist who researched the clinical use of LSD, then holotropic breathwork.
Stanley TucciAmerican actor, director and food writer, co-director of Big Night (1996) and author of the memoir Taste: My Life Through Food (2021).
Stefan FatsisThrows himself into competitive Scrabble and pro football to see what obsession looks like up close.
Stephanie FooComplex PTSD from the inside, joining her own story with the science.
Stephen BatchelorThe leading voice of secular Buddhism.
Stephen FryEnglish actor, comedian and writer, author of the novel The Liar, three volumes of autobiography and the Greek myths series that began with Mythos (2017).
Stephen KingThe master of horror, and a much wider writer than that label suggests.
Steve CollDeeply sourced histories of American power abroad, above all in Afghanistan.
Steve MartinAmerican comedian, actor, musician and author of Shopgirl (2000), Born Standing Up (2007) and An Object of Beauty (2010).
Steve SilbermanReframed the history of autism and popularised neurodiversity in NeuroTribes.
Steven BartlettEntrepreneur-turned-interviewer whose writing carries the same curiosity as his podcast — always asking what's actually driving someone.
Steven D. LevittUses economic data to explain everyday behaviour, from cheating to crime, in Freakonomics.
Steven PinkerCognitive scientist who writes about language, the mind and human progress, from The Language Instinct to Enlightenment Now.
Stuart RitchieExposes how fraud, bias, negligence and hype weaken published science.
Studs TerkelLet ordinary Americans talk about work and life until oral history became its own kind of literature.
Sue JohnsonDeveloped Emotionally Focused Therapy and brought it to readers in Hold Me Tight.
Sue MillerClose, realistic novels about marriage, motherhood and family secrets, starting with The Good Mother.
Suketu MehtaReturned to Mumbai to write about its gangsters, police and film stars from the inside.
Suleika JaouadWrote through leukemia and remission with a diarist's honesty about what illness does to a sense of self.
Sun TzuAncient military strategist whose short treatise still gets quoted in boardrooms.
Susan BlackmoreParapsychologist turned sceptic who writes about consciousness and memes.
Susan CainMade a case for introversion in a culture built to reward the loudest person in the room.
Susan CaseyChases great white sharks, giant waves and the deep sea, and the obsessives drawn to them.
Susan DavidEmotional agility: facing difficult emotions with curiosity.
Susan FaludiDocumented the 1980s backlash against feminism in American media and culture.
Susan ForwardNamed harmful patterns in close relationships, from toxic parents to emotional blackmail.
Susan GlaspellPulitzer-winning playwright and novelist whose Trifles turned a farm-kitchen murder into a quiet feminist classic.
Susan JacobyHistories of reason, secularism and freethought in American public life.
Susan OrleanFinds an entire world of obsession inside subjects most people would call small.
Susan SontagA critic who could make an essay about photography or illness feel like the most urgent thing you'd read all year.
Susan WiggsWarm, family-centred novels about women who go home and rebuild their lives, like the Lakeshore Chronicles.
Susanna KaysenGirl, Interrupted, a memoir of eighteen months in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager.
Susannah CahalanJournalist who wrote her own terrifying case of misdiagnosed autoimmune illness.
Svetlana AlexievichNobel laureate who builds oral history into something closer to a chorus of witnesses.
Swami RamaHimalayan yogi and teacher; author of Living with the Himalayan Masters.
Swami VivekanandaBrought Vedanta to the West after his famous 1893 Chicago speech.
Sy MontgomeryNaturalist who writes about octopuses and other animals as individuals with inner lives.
Sylvia PlathPoet and novelist whose confessional intensity reshaped what women's writing was allowed to say.
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T

T. S. EliotThe Waste Land, the many-voiced poem of 1922 that became a landmark of modernism.
T.H. WhiteRetold the King Arthur legend as a story about education, power and war.
Ta-Nehisi CoatesEssayist on race in America, from Between the World and Me to The Message.
Tana FrenchDublin crime novels that care more about the detectives’ minds than the whodunit.
Tara BrachBrings Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy together in teaching on self-acceptance.
Tara WestoverGrew up without school in rural Idaho and went on to a Cambridge PhD, the story told in Educated.
Tarana BurkeFounded the Me Too movement in 2006 and tells her own story in the memoir Unbound.
Taylor Jenkins ReidNovelist of fictional celebrities so vivid that readers keep searching for them online.
Ted ConoverImmersive journalist who takes the actual job to write the actual story.
Ted GenowaysPoet turned reporter who follows American food from the meatpacking line to the family farm.
Tegan and SaraCanadian musical duo of identical twins Tegan Quin and Sara Quin, authors of the memoir High School (2019) and the graphic novels Junior High (2023) and Crush (2024).
Tenzin PalmoBritish-born Tibetan Buddhist nun who spent twelve years in a Himalayan cave.
Teresa of ÁvilaCarmelite nun who reformed her order and mapped the soul’s inner life.
Tessa HadleyQuietly exact novels and stories about families, marriages and what goes unsaid.
Tetsurō WatsujiArgued that people exist in space and in their relations with each other, not only in time.
Teun VoetenWar photographer and anthropologist who lived for months among the homeless in a tunnel under Manhattan.
Theodore H. SchwartzNeurosurgeon writing about the brain from the vantage point of someone who operates on it.
Thi BuiGraphic memoirist tracing her family's escape from Vietnam across generations.
Thich Nhat HanhMade mindfulness feel less like a practice and more like a way of noticing you were already alive.
Thomas HardyTragic novels of rural Wessex, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, then poetry after he gave up fiction.
Thomas KeatingOne of the three Trappist monks who developed Centering Prayer.
Thomas MannLong, ironic novels of art, illness and death, and opposition to Hitler from exile.
Thomas McGuaneMontana writer of fishing, ranching, and men in comic freefall.
Thomas MertonTrappist monk whose autobiography made monastic life a bestseller subject.
Thomas MetzingerThe self-model theory: the claim that no one has or is a self.
Thomas NagelArgues that conscious experience cannot be captured from an objective point of view.
Thomas PynchonReclusive author of dense, paranoid, very funny novels like Gravity’s Rainbow.
Timothy MortonRethinks ecology without “Nature” and coined “hyperobjects” for things like global warming.
Tina FeyAmerican comedian, writer and actor, first female head writer of Saturday Night Live and creator of 30 Rock, author of the memoir Bossypants (2011).
Tina KnowlesA memoir about building a family and a business empire from the ground up, written with warmth instead of polish.
Tina TurnerAmerican-born Swiss singer and performer, author of the memoirs I, Tina (1986) and My Love Story (2018) and of Happiness Becomes You (2020).
Tobias WolffMaster of the short story and the memoir of a boy reinventing himself in This Boy’s Life.
Tom HanksAmerican actor and author of the story collection Uncommon Type (2017) and the novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (2023).
Tom PerrottaFunny, humane novels about suburban America, from Election to Little Children.
Tom RobbinsComic, philosophical novels full of wild metaphors, from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to Jitterbug Perfume.
Tom WolfeNew Journalism pioneer whose white suit matched his maximalist, satirical prose.
Tom ZoellnerFollows one thing, a diamond, a rock, a railway, across the world until it explains the world.
Toni MorrisonSentences built like architecture — every one load-bearing, every silence in her novels doing as much work as the words.
Tony Parsons“The Open Secret”: an uncompromising non-dual message that there is no separate self.
Tove JanssonCreated the Moomins in books and comic strips, and wrote The Summer Book for adults.
Tracey ThornEnglish singer, songwriter and author, one half of Everything but the Girl, known for her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (2013).
Tracy KidderStayed with ordinary people at work for years, from engineers to a doctor in Haiti.
Trevor NoahComedian whose memoir of a mixed-race childhood under apartheid is funnier and darker than expected.
Truman CapoteInvented the nonfiction novel with In Cold Blood, and wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Twyla TharpChoreographer who mixed ballet, modern dance and pop music, and wrote The Creative Habit.
Tyler PerryBuilt a media empire from stage plays rooted in faith, family, and resilience.
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U

Upton SinclairMuckraking novelist whose The Jungle exposed Chicago's meatpacking plants and helped change food law.
Ursula K. Le GuinBuilt whole worlds to ask how else people might live, from Earthsea to The Dispossessed.
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V

V.S. RamachandranNeuroscientist who uses strange cases, phantom limbs and mirror boxes, to show how the brain builds the self.
Vance PackardBest-selling 1950s and 1960s critiques of American consumer society.
Vanessa SpringoraLe Consentement (2020), the memoir about Gabriel Matzneff that led to a criminal investigation.
Vasily GrossmanLife and Fate, the Stalingrad novel the Soviet state confiscated in 1961.
Viktor FranklSurvived the camps and built a whole theory of meaning out of what he found there — not despite the suffering, but by looking straight at it.
Viola DavisActress whose memoir refuses to soften the poverty and shame she grew up inside.
Virginia GiuffreSurvivor whose testimony helped expose the Epstein network.
Virginia WoolfRemade the novel from the inside out and argued that a woman needs a room of her own.
Viv AlbertineEnglish musician and author, guitarist of The Slits (1977-1982), known for her memoirs Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014) and To Throw Away Unopened (2018).
Vivian GornickMemoir and essays, above all Fierce Attachments about her mother, on women, work and independence.
Vladimir NabokovProse so precise it borders on cruelty — language used as a scalpel, never a blur.
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W

W. G. SebaldWalks, photographs and memory: hypnotic books that sit somewhere between novel, essay and travelogue.
W. H. AudenThe leading English poet of the 1930s, who moved to America in 1939.
Wallace StegnerThe “dean of Western writers”, novelist and conservationist of the American West.
Wally LambNovelist of long, heavy family sagas about twins, trauma, and the slow work of forgiveness.
Walt WhitmanLeaves of Grass, the book of free verse he kept revising until his death.
Walter BenjaminEssays on art, history and the modern city, including “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.
Wangari MaathaiNobel Peace laureate who turned tree-planting into a national movement for democracy and land.
Wayne DyerTherapist turned self-help giant, from Your Erroneous Zones to the power of intention.
Wendell BerryKentucky farmer, poet and essayist writing about land, community and staying put.
Werner HerzogGerman filmmaker whose diaries and memoir are as obsessive, funny and extreme as his films.
Will SmithAmerican actor, rapper and author of the memoir Will (2021), written with Mark Manson.
Will StorrSpends time with people who believe the unbelievable, then explains the stories our brains tell us.
Willa CatherNovels of immigrant pioneer life on the Nebraska prairie, from O Pioneers! to My Antonia.
William BlakeIlluminated books he etched, printed and coloured himself, above all Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
William FaulknerSouthern modernist of Yoknapatawpha County and the long, haunted sentence.
William FinneganWar reporter and surfer whose memoir treats waves with the same seriousness as conflict zones.
William GaddisWrote vast, dialogue-driven satires of money, art and fraud, from The Recognitions to J R.
William JamesFather of American psychology and the leading voice of pragmatism.
William LangewieschePilot turned reporter who explained how ships, planes and systems really work, and fail.
William S. BurroughsNaked Lunch, the cut-up technique and the oldest figure of the Beat Generation.
William TrevorIrish master of the quiet short story about loneliness and small mercies.
William WordsworthEnglish Romantic poet who, with Coleridge, changed the language of English poetry.
Wisława SzymborskaPolish poet whose short, ironic poems look at ordinary things.
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Y

Yaa GyasiHomegoing, slavery’s legacy traced through two branches of one Ghanaian family.
Yann MartelWrote Life of Pi, the Booker-winning novel about a boy adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger.
Yasunari KawabataSpare, lyrical novels of loneliness and beauty, above all Snow Country.
Yiyun LiChinese-born writer whose quiet fiction and essays look straight at loneliness and grief.
Yoko OgawaQuiet, uncanny Japanese fiction about memory and loss, including The Memory Police.
Yoko TawadaFiction, poetry and essays written in both Japanese and German.
Yoshida KenkōBuddhist monk who wrote Tsurezuregusa, the Essays in Idleness.
Yukio MishimaNovels that set beauty, the body and death against postwar Japan.
Yuval Noah HarariSapiens tells human history as one argument: we rule the planet because we cooperate around shared fictions.
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Z

Zadie SmithNovelist and essayist whose voice moves easily between London multiculturalism and sharp cultural criticism.
Zahra Fatima HankirEditor amplifying the work of women war correspondents from the Arab world.
Zora Neale HurstonAnthropologist and novelist of Black Southern life, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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Frequently Asked Questions

Which authors are featured on lisanneswart.com?

This page lists 1028 author guides, spanning memoir, philosophy, fiction, and journalism, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Viktor Frankl, Oscar Wilde, and Susan Sontag. Each author page includes a bibliography and recommended reading order.

How are authors organized on this page?

Authors are organized alphabetically by first name, with each name linking to a dedicated guide covering their key works, recommended reading order, and books by similar authors.

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