In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.
Author Gabriel García Márquez – the first Colombian to win a Nobel prize, for literature – also dreamed of peace.
John Vizcaino/Reuters
From the yellow butterflies of his ‘Hundred Years of Solitude’ to his Nobel acceptance speech, author Gabriel García Márquez remains ever present in his country’s peace process.
The gender of the writer can cause some readers to change their analysis of a novel.
Liz Lux/Flickr.com
The young adult novel “Eleanor & Park” is a frequent target for book challengers. But swears and sex aside, there’s something deeply subversive – and important – about this controversial book.
Carl Rahl’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1852).
Wikimedia
The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
Unlike Dr Strangelove, few people learned to love the bomb – but it changed society nonetheless.
Columbia Pictures
Science fiction is a popular and lucrative genre – but most authors are men and relatable female characters are sadly lacking. Given this entrenched sexism, it’s time for publishers to take affirmative action.
All five novels explore alienation. But each is remarkably readable; with a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot.
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, by Vasily Perov (1872).
Vasily Perov/Wikimedia Commons
When penning his novel ‘Demons,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky was influenced by political turmoil in Russia. But his impulsive, crass antagonist bears a striking similarity to the GOP’s candidate for president.
Icelandic sagas are under-appreciated in the world of European literature.
Oscar Wergeland [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Family feuds, love affairs, empire writing back to the motherland - the medieval Icelandic saga have it all. Though less known than other classics of European literature they richly deserve a place among the best.
Seasons, stars, settler colonialism: the nations of the south – Australia, Argentina and South Africa – have much in common. And the 2003 Nobel laureate for literature, JM Coetzee, is helping reframe Australian writing within this southern context.
With our attention diverted, we’re no longer in the moment.
'Concert' via www.shutterstock.com
Whether it’s through Facebook or Snapchat, images and videos are changing how we communicate. But as words become more trivial, our attention, our creativity, and even our empathy may be at stake.
Its critics complain that current Afrodiasporic literature is not in tune with everyday life on the continent. They see its versions of Africa as sanitised and Westernised.
Writer Thomas Wolfe is played by Jude Law in ‘Genius.’
Wikimedia Commons
The president of the Thomas Wolfe Society explains why Law had his work cut out for him when he agreed to portray a man who was “a hydroelectric plant of emotion.”