Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo/Waddesdon Manor/National Portrait Gallery
Their novels feature defiant heroines, who resist the tyranny of forced marriages and seek moral, intellectual and economic liberation.
Around the Fish – Paul Klee (1926)
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Alice B. Toklas and her partner, the influential modernist writer Gertrude Stein, hosted a celebrated Paris salon. Toklas would go on to write an unusual bestseller.
L-R: Mike Skinner, Ray Davies, James Smith of Yard Act and Lady Leshurr.
Edd Westmacott/John Atashian/Thomas Jackson/UPI/Alamy Stock Photo
Social and literary realism have long detailed people’s everyday lives – and they have been a staple in popular music for decades.
Betty Smith’s novel sold millions of copies in the 1940s.
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No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation. But Smith rarely saw her hometown through rose-colored glasses − and even grew to resent it.
Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.
America’s biggest book publishers originally viewed LGBTQ+ romance as a niche market.
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It’s tempting to see this trend as a sign of the times. But the biggest book publishers started changing their approach only once they realized they were leaving money on the table.
Retranslations are making their way into book covers.
Which version of “The Metamorphosis” or “Crime and Punishment” should you choose? In a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find many different English translations.
Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.
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These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.
We need to speak more about how to become the kind of man who can openly show love for others while accepting love from those who care.
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Encouraging men to take the risk of expressing tender feelings for others is part of relying on love as a tool of anti-racist and decolonial education.
Photo of J.M. Coetzee: Laterthanyouthink, via Wikimedia Commons
The fiction of J.M. Coetzee is always formally daring, brave in its social critique and its refusal to play by the rules.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everything
Ellis Humphrey Evans, known by his bardic name Hedd Wyn, was killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele.
Chronicle/Alamy
Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.
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Research suggests the act of creative writing can have therapeutic benefits.
Detail from the cover of Peponi, the Kiswahili translation of Tanzanian Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Paradise.
Mkuki Na Nyota
Swahili readers who have not encountered Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work in other languages are in for a great treat.
These books had our academics gripped until their final pages.
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Evidence suggests that writing was probably invented in southern Iraq sometime before 3000BC. But what happened next?
Louisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.
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By disguising her name, Alcott could publish in less prestigious venues without worrying about tarnishing her literary reputation.
A. S. Byatt in 1999.
INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
In Byatt’s fiction, northern locations become emblems of the climate crisis and of how human actions have detrimental effects on the whole planet.
Bernice Rubens was born in a working class area of Cardiff.
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Bernice Rubens won the 1970 Booker prize for her novel, The Elected Member, and is the only Welsh person to have ever won the prize.
Colin C Murphy/Unsplash/Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House
Irish writers have benefited from structural factors in recent years. However, ask them in person and Irish writers are more likely to highlight impediments to producing work.