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Orestes Augustus Brownson (September 16, 1803 – April 17, 1876) was an American intellectual, activist, preacher, labor organizer, and writer. Brownson was also a noted Catholic convert. Brownson was a publicist, a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists through his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism.

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Amos Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799 – March 4, 1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a plant-based diet. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights. Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, in 1799, Alcott had only minimal formal schooling before attempting a career as a traveling salesman. Worried that the itinerant life might have a negative impact on his soul, he turned to teaching. His innovative methods, however, were controversial, and he rarely stayed in one place very long. His most well-known teaching position was at the Temple School in Boston. His experience there was turned into two books: Records of a School and Conversations with Children on the Gospels. Alcott became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and became a major figure in transcendentalism. His writings on behalf of that movement, however, are heavily criticized for being incoherent. Based on his ideas for human perfection, Alcott founded Fruitlands, a transcendentalist experiment in community living. The project failed after seven months. Alcott and his family struggled financially for most of his life. Nevertheless, he continued focusing on educational projects and opened a new school at the end of his life in 1879. He died in 1888. Alcott married Abby May in 1830, and they had four surviving children, all daughters. Their second was Louisa May, who fictionalized her experience with the family in her novel Little Women in 1868.

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Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, (nee Haldane; 1 November 1897 - 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often referred to as the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books covering a wide range of genre including historical, science fiction, travelogue and autobiography. With her husband Gilbert Richard Mitchison becoming a life peer in 1964, she was also entitled to call herself Lady Mitchison, but never used the title herself. She was appointed CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1981. Following her father John Scott Haldane and elder brother J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison initially pursued a scientific career. From 1908 she and her brother started investigating Mendelian genetics. Their publication in 1915 became the first demonstration of genetic linkage in mammals. But while a diploma student at Society of Oxford Home Students (later St Anne's College, Oxford), the First World War broke out that changed her interest to nursing. Her finest novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) is regarded by some as the best historical novel of the 20th century. Naomi Mitchison was a vocal feminist, particularly campaigning for birth control. We Have Been Warned (1935) is regarded as her most controversial work due to explicit sexuality. The book was rejected by leading publishers and ultimately censored. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction and cultural history who has published widely on fairy tales. Her books include From the Beast to the Blonde and Stranger Magic, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is professor of literature, film, and theatre studies at the University of Essex and a fellow of All Souls, University of Oxford.

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Myriam Warner-Vieyra was born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1939. She spent a large part of her childhood with her grandmother in Guadeloupe. She then went to live in France, where she finished her secondary education and afterwards attended the University of Dakar, where she obtained a librarian's diploma. She married the film-maker Paulin Vieyra and she has lived in Senegal for thirty years. She is a librarian and has three adult children (in 1992).

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Gisèle Pineau (born May 18, 1956) is a French novelist, writer and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean and she has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a black person growing up in Parisian society. In particular, she focuses on racism and the effects it can have on a young girl trying to discover her own cultural identity. Her book L'Exil Selon Julia highlights this, as she relies on the memories and experiences of her aged grandmother to help her learn about her society's traditions and her own cultural background. In the book, she also mentions that the discrimination she felt as a youngster did not only apply to French society in Paris, but also to the people of Guadeloupe, who rejected her for being too cosmopolitan upon her return to the land of her ancestors. She for many years lived in Paris and, whilst maintaining her writing career, has also returned to being a psychiatric nurse in order to balance out her life; but she recently has moved back to Guadeloupe.

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Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Her parents were originally from Guadeloupe. Her father was a soldier while her mother was a teacher. When the Second World War broke out, her father stayed in France to fight, while she and her mother returned to Guadeloupe. She lived in a rather dilapidated school group with her mother. She studied at Pointe-à-Pitre, followed by Paris and Dakar. At the age of 18, while studying in Paris, she met her future husband, Andre Schwarz-Bart, who encouraged her to take up writing as a career. They married in 1960, and lived at various times in Senegal, Switzerland, Paris, and Guadeloupe. Schwarz-Bart at one time ran a Creole furniture business as well as a restaurant. Her husband died in 2006. They have two sons, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a noted jazz saxophonist, and Bernard Schwarz-Bart. She currently lives in Goyave, a small village in Guadeloupe. In 1967, together with her husband, Andre Schwarz-Bart, she wrote Un plat de porc aux bananas vertes, a historical novel exploring the parallels in the exiles of Caribbeans and Jews. In 1972, they published La Mulâtresse Solitude. In 1989, they wrote a six-volume encyclopaedia Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women), to honour the black heroines who were missing in the official historiography. Despite being mentioned as her husband's collaborator in their works, critics have often attributed full authorship to Andre Schwarz-Bart, and only his name appears in the French edition of La Mulâtresse Solitude. Her authorship is acknowledged, however, in the English translation of the book. In 1972, Schwarz-Bart wrote Pluie et vent sur TElumEe Miracle, which is considered one of the masterpieces of Caribbean literature. She wrote the book after the loss of a dear friend named StEphanie whom she considered to be "her grandmother, her sister ..." For her "it was the country that went away with this person" In 1979, she published Ti jean l'horizon. Schwarz-Bart has also written for the theatre: Ton beau capitaine was a well-received play in one act. Schwarz-Bart, along with her husband, is deeply committed to political issues, and the issues faced by people, especially women, of colour. She has explored the languages and locations of her ancestry in her works, and examines male domination over women in the Caribbean, as well as themes of alienation in exile. In his novel Pluie et vent sur TElumEe Miracle, the aim is indeed to identify the process by which women become women. The famous sentence of Simone de Beauvoir, "we are not born a woman, we become it" will not have escaped you, but much more than a conceptual formula. Schwartz-Bart highlights this statement in his production by mentioning the genealogy of its literary staff. This evocation will constitute a database, understood like historical, in which is given to have elements characteristic of the West Indies woman. Schwarz-Bart attempts to rehabilitate female figures in this West Indies discourse by giving them a decisive place. She links to the heritage of feminism which is part of the West Indies reflection discourse which it projects as a social and historical reality which would legitimize the latter. The reintegration of women into the general historicity of the West Indies will have enabled the reader of Simone Schwarz-Bart to reposition women in the social relations of power, both subject to the colonial system and to that of compulsory "herocentrism". In this positioning, the woman shows herself to be humble, modest and courageous.

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Maryse Conde (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycee Fenelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Conde, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Conde had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Conde's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolite, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Conde has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.' Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Conde's paternal great-grandmother.

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ODYSSEUS ELYTIS was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911. He studied law at the University of Athens. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1935; since the publication of his first book of poems in 1940, ten further volumes of his poetry have appeared. He has also published three collections of essays, and translations from a wide range of modern writers including Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Ungaretti and Brecht. In 1940-1 he took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania. During the Nazi occupation he was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance. He lived in Paris from 1948-52; since then his home has been in Athens. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him 'for his poetry which against the background of Greek tradition depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'. EDMUND KEELEY is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. He has translated several of the leading modem Greek poets, often in collaboration with Philip Sherrard (the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis, a selection of Angelus Sikelianos). His translations of Yannis Ritsos, Ritsos in Parentheses, appeared in 1979. GEORGE SAVIDIS is Professor of Modem Greek at the University of Salonika, and George Seferis Visiting Professor of Modem Greek Studies at Harvard University. He is editor of the Greek texts of Cavafy, Seferis and Sikelianos, among others, and he has also collaborated with Edmund Keeley on translations of Cavafy's poems, Passions and Ancient Days.

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George Seferis (the nom de plume of George Seferiades) was born in Smyrna in 1900, and moved to Athens with his family when he was fourteen. He studied in Paris at the end of the First World War and afterward joined the Greek diplomatic service. From 1957 to 1962 he lived in London as Ambassador of Greece to the Court of St. James's. His first collection of poetry, TURNING POINT, was published in 1931. Since then he has published several other collections of both poetry and essays, which have been translated into many languages, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Cambridge (1960), Thessalonika (1964) and Oxford (1964).

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Harry Kurt Victor Mulisch (29 July 1927 - 30 October 2010) was a Dutch writer. He wrote more than 80 novels, plays, essays, poems and philosophical reflections. These have been translated into more than 30 languages. Along with Willem Frederik Hermans and Gerard Reve, Mulisch is considered one of the 'Great Three' of Dutch postwar literature. His novel The Assault became a 1986 film, which won both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. A 2007 poll revealed his 1992 novel The Discovery of Heaven as the 'Best Dutch Book Ever'. He was regularly thought of as a possible future Nobel laureate. Mulisch was born in Haarlem and lived in Amsterdam from 1958 until his death in 2010. Mulisch's father was from Austria-Hungary and emigrated to the Netherlands after the First World War. During the German occupation in World War II his father worked for a German bank, which also dealt with confiscated Jewish assets. His mother, Alice Schwarz, was Jewish. Mulisch and his mother escaped transportation to a concentration camp thanks to Mulisch's father's collaboration with the Nazis, but his maternal grandmother died in a gas chamber. Mulisch was mostly raised by his parents' housemaid, Frieda Falk. Mulisch said of himself, he did not just write about World War II, he was WWII. Mulisch died in 2010. His death occurred at his Amsterdam home and his family was with him at the time. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte described his death as 'a loss for Dutch literature and the Netherlands'. Culture minister Halbe Zijlstra bemoaned the demise of the 'Big Three' as Gerard Reve and Willem Frederik Hermans had already died. Marlise Simons of The New York Times said his 'gift for writing with clarity about moral and philosophical themes made him an enormously influential figure in the Netherlands and earned him recognition abroad' The L Magazine '​s Mark Ashe quoted the American editions of his novels by referring to him as 'Holland's Greatest Author' and 'Holland's most important postwar writer'. Mulisch had two daughters, his daughters Frieda and Anna, with his wife Sjoerdje Woudenberg, and a son, Menzo, from his relationship with Kitty Saal. Also surviving him are his granddaughters Naomi and Lucia Mulisch. Mulisch gained international recognition with the film The Assault (1986), based on his book of the same title (1982). It received an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign movie and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novel The Discovery of Heaven (1992) is considered his masterpiece, and was voted “the best Dutch-language book ever” by Dutch readers in a 2007 newspaper poll. “It is the book that shaped our generation; it made us love, even obsess, with reading,” said Peter-Paul Spanjaard, 32, a lawyer in Amsterdam at the time of Mulisch's death. It was filmed in 2001 as The Discovery of Heaven by Jeroen KrabbE, starring Stephen Fry. Among the many awards he received for individual works and his total body of work, the most important is the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren (Prize of Dutch Literature, a lifetime achievement award) in 1995. A frequent theme in his work is the Second World War. His father had worked for the Germans during the war and went to prison for three years afterwards. As the war spanned most of Mulisch's formative phase, it had a defining influence on his life and work. In 1963, he wrote a non-fiction work about the Eichmann case: Criminal Case 40/61. Major works set against the backdrop of the Second World War are De Aanslag (The Assault), Het stenen bruidsbed, and Siegfried. Mulisch often incorporated ancient legends or myths in his writings, drawing on Greek mythology (e.g. in De Elementen), Jewish mysticism (in De ontdekking van de Hemel and De Procedure), well known urban legends and politics (Mulisch was politically left-wing, once signing a book 'dedicated in admiration' to Fidel Castro).

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Cees Nooteboom is the author of five novels, six collections of poetry, five travel books, and a play. He has been awarded several prizes during his career, including, in 1957, Second Prize from the Anne Frank Foundation for his critically acclaimed first novel PHILIP EN DE ANDEREN (PHILIP AND THE OTHERS) and, in 1963, the Van der Hootg Prize for his novel DE RIDDER'S GESTORVEN (THE KNIGHT HAS FALLEN). RITUALS is the first of his books to be translated into English.

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Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.

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Hugo Maurice Julien Claus (5 April 1929 - 19 March 2008) was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director. He wrote primarily in Dutch, although he also wrote some poetry in English. His death by euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium, led to considerable controversy.

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Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author and activist. She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.She also wrote Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland among other works.

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TERRY MCMILLAN has been a fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She has received grants from the PEN American Center, the Authors League, the Carnegie Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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John Oliver Killens (January 14, 1916 – October 27, 1987) was an American fiction writer from Georgia. His novels featured elements of African-American life. In his debut novel, Youngblood (1954), Killens coined the phrase "kicking ass and taking names". He also wrote plays, short stories and essays, and published articles in a range of outlets. Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles Killens Sr. and Willie Lee Killens.His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes' writings, and his mother, who was president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry. Killens was an enthusiastic reader as a child and was inspired by writers such as Hughes and Richard Wright. His great-grandmother’s tales of slavery were another important factor in learning traditional black mythology and folklore, which he later incorporated into his writings. Killens graduated in 1933 from the Ballard Normal School in Macon, a private institution run by the American Missionary Association. It was then one of the few secondary schools for blacks in Georgia, which had a segregated system of public schools and historically underfunded those for black students. Aspiring to become a lawyer, Killens attended several historically black colleges and universities between 1934 and 1936: Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida; Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; and Robert H. Terrell Law School in Washington, D.C. He also studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. Killens enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving as a member of the Pacific Amphibious Forces from 1942 to 1945. He spent more than two years in the South Pacific, and rose to the rank of master sergeant. In 1948, Killens moved to New York City, where he worked to establish a literary career. He attended writing classes at Columbia University and at New York University. He was an active member of many organizations, serving as a union representative to a local chapter of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and joining the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Around 1950, Killens co-founded with Rosa Guy and others a writers' group that became the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG). His first novel, Youngblood (1954), dealing with a black Georgia family in the early 1900s, was read and developed at HWG meetings in members' homes. In his book, he first coined the expression "kicking ass and taking names". Killens became friends with actor Harry Belafonte, who after establishing his production company HarBel wanted to adapt William P. McGivern's crime novel Odds Against Tomorrow as a film. Belafonte picked Abraham Polonsky as the screenwriter, but since Polonsky had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Killens agreed to act as his front and was credited with the screenplay for the film. In 1996, the Writers Guild of America restored credit to Polonsky for the film under his own name. Killens's second novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), was about the treatment of the black soldiers in the military during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated. Critic Noel Perrin ranked it as one of five major works of fiction of World War II. Killens's third novel, Sippi (1967), focused on the voting rights struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Slaves (1969), a historical novel by Killens, was developed from the screenplay for the film of the same name, intended to accompany its release. In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), Killens explored upper-class African-American society. In addition to novels, Killens also wrote plays, screenplays, and many articles and short stories. He published these works in a range of media, including The Black Scholar, The New York Times, Ebony, Redbook, Negro Digest and Black World.[8] According to Kira Alexander, "On June 7, 1964, Killens reached his largest audience when his essay 'Explanation of the "Black Psyche"' was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine." He produced five further articles, which were published in his 1965 collection Black Man's Burden. Killens taught creative-writing programs at Fisk University, Howard University, Columbia University, and Medgar Evers College. In 1986, he founded the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College. Named in the author's honor, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is published twice a year by the Center. On June 19, 1943, Killens married Grace Ward Jones.They had two children together: a son, Jon Charles (born 1944), and a daughter, Barbara (born 1947). In 1987, Killens died of cancer, aged 71, at the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center in Brooklyn, New York. He was living in Crown Heights.

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