Portal:Writing
Introduction
The Rosetta Stone, with writing in three different scripts, was instrumental in deciphering Ancient Egyptian.
Writing is a medium of human communication that represents language and emotion with signs and symbols. In most languages, writing is a complement to speech or spoken language. Writing is not a language, but a tool used to make languages be read. Within a language system, writing relies on many of the same structures as speech, such as vocabulary, grammar, and semantics, with the added dependency of a system of signs or symbols. The result of writing is called text, and the recipient of text is called a reader. Motivations for writing include publication, storytelling, correspondence, record keeping and diary. Writing has been instrumental in keeping history, maintaining culture, dissemination of knowledge through the media and the formation of legal systems.
As human societies emerged, the development of writing was driven by pragmatic exigencies such as exchanging information, maintaining financial accounts, codifying laws and recording history. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. In both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, writing may have evolved through calendric and a political necessity for recording historical and environmental events.
Selected general articles
Digital scanning of microfilm (see Digital conversion below).
Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about one twenty-fifth of the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used.
All microform images may be provided as positives or negatives, more often the latter. Read more...
Textile printing is the process of applying colour to fabric in definite patterns or designs. In properly printed fabrics the colour is bonded with the fibre, so as to resist washing and friction. Textile printing is related to dyeing but in dyeing properly the whole fabric is uniformly covered with one colour, whereas in printing one or more colours are applied to it in certain parts only, and in sharply defined patterns.
In printing, wooden blocks, stencils, engraved plates, rollers, or silkscreens can be used to place colours on the fabric. Colourants used in printing contain dyes thickened to prevent the colour from spreading by capillary attraction beyond the limits of the pattern or design. Read more...
Oracle bones (Chinese: 甲骨; pinyin: jiǎgǔ) are pieces of ox scapula or turtle plastron, which were used for pyromancy – a form of divination – in ancient China, mainly during the late Shang dynasty. Scapulimancy is the correct term if ox scapulae were used for the divination; plastromancy if turtle plastrons were used.
Diviners would submit questions to deities regarding future weather, crop planting, the fortunes of members of the royal family, military endeavors, and other similar topics. These questions were carved onto the bone or shell in oracle bone script using a sharp tool. Intense heat was then applied with a metal rod until the bone or shell cracked due to thermal expansion. The diviner would then interpret the pattern of cracks and write the prognostication upon the piece as well. Pyromancy with bones continued in China into the Zhou dynasty, but the questions and prognostications were increasingly written with brushes and cinnabar ink, which degraded over time. Read more...
Skywriting is the process of using a small aircraft, able to expel special smoke during flight, to fly in certain patterns that create writing readable by someone on the ground. The message is often a frivolous phrase, a generally meaningless greeting, or an advertisement aimed at everyone in the vicinity, a general public display of celebration or goodwill, or a personal message, such as a marriage proposal or birthday wish. Read more...
The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a Greek manuscript of the Bible from the 5th century, is a palimpsest.
In textual studies, a palimpsest (/ˈpælɪmpsɛst/) is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. Pergamene (now known as parchment) was made of lamb, calf, or goat kid skin (best made in ancient Pergamon) and was expensive and not readily available, so in the interest of economy a pergamene often was re-used by scraping the previous writing. In colloquial usage, the term palimpsest is also used in architecture, archaeology, and geomorphology to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another, for example a monumental brass the reverse blank side of which has been re-engraved. Read more...
Christ Pantocrator seated in a capital "U" in an illuminated manuscript from the Badische Landesbibliothek, Germany.
A manuscript (abbreviated MS for singular and MSS for plural) was, traditionally, any document that is written by hand -- or, once practical typewriters became available, typewritten -- as opposed to being mechanically printed or reproduced in some indirect or automated way. More recently, the term has come to be understood to further include any written, typed, or word-processed copy of an author's work, as distinguished from its rendition as a printed version of the same. Before the arrival of printing, all documents and books were manuscripts. Manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in book form, scrolls or in codex format. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations. A document should be at least 75 years old to be considered a manuscript. Read more...- An electronic visual display, informally a screen, is a display device for presentation of images, text, or video transmitted electronically, without producing a permanent record. Electronic visual displays include television sets, computer monitors, and digital signage. By the above definition, an overhead projector (along with screen onto which the text, images, or video is projected) could reasonably be considered an electronic visual display since it is a display device for the presentation of an images, plain text, or video transmitted electronically without producing a permanent record. They are also ubiquitous in mobile computing applications like tablet computers, smartphones, and information appliances. Read more...
Side view of Lorenzo Ghiberti's cast gilt-bronze Gates of Paradise at the Florence Baptistery in Florence, Italy, combining high-relief main figures with backgrounds mostly in low relief
Relief is a sculptural technique where the sculpted elements remain attached to a solid background of the same material. The term relief is from the Latin verb relevo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane. What is actually performed when a relief is cut in from a flat surface of stone (relief sculpture) or wood (relief carving) is a lowering of the field, leaving the unsculpted parts seemingly raised. The technique involves considerable chiselling away of the background, which is a time-consuming exercise. On the other hand, a relief saves forming the rear of a subject, and is less fragile and more securely fixed than a sculpture in the round, especially one of a standing figure where the ankles are a potential weak point, especially in stone. In other materials such as metal, clay, plaster stucco, ceramics or papier-mâché the form can be just added to or raised up from the background, and monumental bronze reliefs are made by casting.
There are different degrees of relief depending on the degree of projection of the sculpted form from the field, for which the Italian and French terms are still sometimes used in English. The full range includes high relief (alto-rilievo, haut-relief), where more than 50% of the depth is shown and there may be undercut areas, mid-relief (mezzo-rilievo), low-relief (basso-rilievo, or French: bas-relief /ˌbɑːrɪˈliːf/), and shallow-relief or rilievo schiacciato, where the plane is only very slightly lower than the sculpted elements. There is also sunk relief, which was mainly restricted to Ancient Egypt (see below). However, the distinction between high relief and low relief is the clearest and most important, and these two are generally the only terms used to discuss most work. Read more...
Central European (Northern) type of finished parchment made of goatskin stretched on a wooden frame
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a writing medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of young animals such as lambs and young calves.
It may be called animal membrane by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between "parchment" and the more-restricted term vellum (see below). Read more...- The Mawangdui Silk Texts (Chinese: 馬王堆帛書; pinyin: Mǎwángduī Bóshū) are Chinese philosophical and medical works written on silk which were discovered at the Mawangdui site in Changsha, Hunan, in 1973. They include some of the earliest attested manuscripts of existing texts (such as the I Ching), two copies of the Tao Te Ching, a copy of Zhan Guo Ce, works by Gan De and Shi Shen and previously-unknown medical texts, such as Wushi'er Bingfang (Prescriptions for Fifty-Two Ailments). Scholars arranged them into 28 types of silk books. Their approximately 120,000 words cover military strategy, mathematics, cartography and the six classical arts: ritual, music, archery, horsemanship, writing and arithmetic. Read more...
Bottles of ink from Germany
Ink is a liquid or paste that contains pigments or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing or writing with a pen, brush, or quill. Thicker inks, in paste form, are used extensively in letterpress and lithographic printing.
Ink can be a complex medium, composed of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescents, and other materials. The components of inks serve many purposes; the ink's carrier, colorants, and other additives affect the flow and thickness of the ink and its dry appearance. Read more...
List of the victories of Rimush, king of Akkad, upon Abalgamash, king of Marhashi, and upon Elamitemonumental inscription, ca. 2270 BC. (see Obelisk)
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ṭuppu(m) 𒁾) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.
Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were fired in hot kilns (or inadvertently, when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict) making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the very first archives. They were at the root of first libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East. Read more...
Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets.
It is a versatile material with many uses, including writing, printing, packaging, cleaning, decorating, and a number of industrial and construction processes. Papers are essential in legal or non-legal documentation.
The pulp papermaking process is said to have been developed in China during the early 2nd century CE, possibly as early as the year 105 CE, by the Han court eunuch Cai Lun, although the earliest archaeological fragments of paper derive from the 2nd century BCE in China.
The modern pulp and paper industry is global, with China leading its production and the United States right behind it. Read more...
Intaglio (/ɪnˈtæli.oʊ/ in-TAL-ee-oh; Italian: [inˈtaʎʎo]) is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink. It is the direct opposite of a relief print.
Normally, copper or zinc plates are used as a surface or matrix, and the incisions are created by etching, engraving, drypoint, aquatint or mezzotint. Collagraphs may also be printed as intaglio plates. Read more...
Stamping (also known as pressing) is the process of placing flat sheet metal in either blank or coil form into a stamping press where a tool and die surface forms the metal into a net shape. Stamping includes a variety of sheet-metal forming manufacturing processes, such as punching using a machine press or stamping press, blanking, embossing, bending, flanging, and coining. This could be a single stage operation where every stroke of the press produces the desired form on the sheet metal part, or could occur through a series of stages. The process is usually carried out on sheet metal, but can also be used on other materials, such as polystyrene. Progressive dies are commonly feed from a coil of steel, coil reel for unwinding of coil to a straightener to level the coil and then into a feeder which advances the material into the press and die at a predetermined feed length. Depending on part complexity, the number of stations in the die can be determined.
Stamping is usually done on cold metal sheet. See Forging for hot metal forming operations. Read more...
As a physical object, a book is a stack of usually rectangular pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) oriented with one edge tied, sewn, or otherwise fixed together and then bound to the flexible spine of a protective cover of heavier, relatively inflexible material. The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex (in the plural, codices). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its immediate predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page.
As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and a still considerable, though not so extensive, investment of time to read. This sense of book has a restricted and an unrestricted sense. In the restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage that reflects the fact that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls, and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. So, for instance, each part of Aristotle's Physics is called a book, as of course the Bible encompasses many different books. In the unrestricted sense, a book is the compositional whole of which such sections, whether called books or chapters or parts, are parts. Read more...
The Codex Gigas, 13th century, Bohemia.
A codex (/ˈkoʊdɛks/) (from the Latin caudex for "trunk of a tree" or block of wood, book), plural codices (/ˈkɒdɪsiːz/), is a book constructed of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials. The term is now usually only used of manuscript books, with hand-written contents, but describes the format that is now near-universal for printed books in the Western world. The book is usually bound by stacking the pages and fixing one edge to a bookbinding, which may just be thicker paper (paperback or softback), or with stiff boards, called a hardback, or in elaborate historical examples a treasure binding.
At least in the Western world, the main alternative to the paged codex format for a long document is the continuous scroll, which was the dominant book form in the ancient world. Some codices are continuously folded like a concertina, in particular the Maya and Aztec codices, which are actually long sheets of paper or animal skin folded into pages. These do not really meet most current definitions of the "codex" form, but are so called by convention.[citation needed] Read more...
Vellum is prepared animal skin or "membrane" used as a material for writing on. The term is derived from the Latin word vitulinum meaning "made from calf", leading to Old French velin for "calfskin". Parchment is another term for this material category. If vellum is distinguished, it is by vellum being made from calf skin, as opposed to that from other animals, or otherwise being of higher quality. Vellum is prepared as a surface for writing (or printing) to produce scrolls, single pages, codices or books.
Modern scholars and custodians increasingly use only the safe, if confusing, term "membrane". Depending on factors such as the method of preparation it may be very hard to determine the animal species involved (let alone its age) without using a laboratory, and the term avoids the need to distinguish between vellum and parchment. Read more...
The Joshua Roll, Vatican Library. An illuminated scroll, probably of the 10th century, created in the Byzantine empire.
A scroll (from the Old French escroe or escroue), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing. Read more...
Electronic media are media that use electronics or electromechanical audience to access the content. This is in contrast to static media (mainly print media), which today are most often created electronically, but do not require electronics to be accessed by the end user in the printed form. The primary electronic media sources familiar to the general public are video recordings, audio recordings, multimedia presentations, slide presentations, CD-ROM and online content. Most new media are in the form of digital media. However, electronic media may be in either analogue electronics data or digital electronic data format.
Although the term is usually associated with content recorded on a storage medium, recordings are not required for live broadcasting and online networking. Read more...
Part of the Huexotzinco Codex, written on amate.
Amate (Spanish: amate [aˈmate] from Nahuatl languages: āmatl [ˈaːmat͡ɬ]) is a type of bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since the precontact times. It was used primarily to create codices.
Amate paper was extensively produced and used for both communication, records, and ritual during the Triple Alliance; however, after the Spanish conquest, its production was mostly banned and replaced by European paper. Amate paper production never completely died, nor did the rituals associated with it. It remained strongest in the rugged, remote mountainous areas of northern Puebla and northern Veracruz states. Spiritual leaders in the small village of San Pablito, Puebla were described as producing paper with "magical" properties. Foreign academics began studying this ritual use of amate in the mid-20th century, and the Otomi people of the area began producing the paper commercially. Otomi craftspeople began selling it in cities such as Mexico City, where the paper was revived by Nahua painters in Guerrero to create "new" indigenous craft, which was then promoted by the Mexican government. Read more...- The history of writing traces the development of expressing language by letters or other marks and also the studies and descriptions of these developments.
In the history of how writing systems have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic or early mnemonic symbols. True writing, in which the content of a linguistic utterance is encoded so that another reader can reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the exact utterance written down, is a later development. It is distinguished from proto-writing, which typically avoids encoding grammatical words and affixes, making it more difficult or impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning intended by the writer unless a great deal of context is already known in advance. One of the earliest forms of written expression is cuneiform. Read more...
Ficus aurea, commonly known as the Florida strangler fig (or simply strangler fig), golden fig, or higuerón, is a tree in the family Moraceae that is native to the U.S. state of Florida, the northern and western Caribbean, southern Mexico and Central America south to Panama. The specific epithet aurea was applied by English botanist Thomas Nuttall who described the species in 1846.
Ficus aurea is a strangler fig. In figs of this group, seed germination usually takes place in the canopy of a host tree with the seedling living as an epiphyte until its roots establish contact with the ground. After that, it enlarges and strangles its host, eventually becoming a free-standing tree in its own right. Individuals may reach 30 m (100 ft) in height. Like all figs, it has an obligate mutualism with fig wasps: figs are only pollinated by fig wasps, and fig wasps can only reproduce in fig flowers. The tree provides habitat, food and shelter for a host of tropical lifeforms including epiphytes in cloud forests and birds, mammals, reptiles and invertebrates. F. aurea is used in traditional medicine, for live fencing, as an ornamental and as a bonsai Read more...
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Selected 20th-century writers
Stephen Jay Gould (/ɡuːld/; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, where he divided his time teaching there and at Harvard.
Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching speciation. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record. Read more...- James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 – April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his hardboiled crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications, published from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice—notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times—he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow. In the late 1980s, several of his novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Read more...
James Albert Michener (/ˈmɪtʃnər/; February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997) was an American author of more than 40 books, most of which were fictional, lengthy family sagas covering the lives of many generations in particular geographic locales and incorporating solid history. Michener had numerous bestsellers and works selected for Book of the Month Club, and was known for his meticulous research behind the books.
Michener's novels include Tales of the South Pacific for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948, Hawaii, The Drifters, Centennial, The Source, The Fires of Spring, Chesapeake, Caribbean, Caravans, Alaska, Texas, Space, and Poland. His non-fiction works include Iberia, about his travels in Spain and Portugal; his memoir titled The World Is My Home; and Sports in America. Return to Paradise combines fictional short stories with Michener's factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where they take place. Read more...
Clarke in February 1965, on one of the sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award which is given by UNESCO for popularising science. These along with his science fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction. Read more...
Angelou reciting her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at US President Bill Clinton's inauguration, January 20, 1993
Maya Angelou (/ˈændʒəloʊ/ (
listen); born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, sex worker, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Read more...
Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe uŋɡaˈretti]; 8 February 1888 – 2 June 1970) was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo ("Hermeticism"), he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Like many futurists, he took an irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, L'allegria ("The Joy").
During the interwar period, Ungaretti was a collaborator of Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession), as well as a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d'Italia and Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed Hermeticism as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career. His fascist past was the subject of controversy. Read more...- Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a 2007 interview, Horace Engdahl, former secretary of the Swedish Academy, mentioned Sebald, Ryszard Kapuściński and Jacques Derrida as three recently deceased writers who would have been worthy laureates. Read more...
- Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 – March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views. His best-known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by environmental and eco-terrorist groups, and the non-fiction work Desert Solitaire. Read more...
Harry Mathews (February 14, 1930 – January 25, 2017) was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of French. Read more...- Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎 Ōe Kenzaburō, born 31 January 1935) is a Japanese writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today". Read more...
- Cleo Virginia Andrews (June 6, 1923 – December 19, 1986), better known as V. C. Andrews or Virginia C. Andrews, was an American novelist. She was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Andrews died of breast cancer at the age of 63.
Andrews' novels combine Gothic horror and family saga, revolving around family secrets and forbidden love (frequently involving themes of consensual incest, most often between siblings), and they often include a rags-to-riches story. Her best-known novel is the bestseller Flowers in the Attic (1979), a tale of four children locked in the attic of a wealthy Virginia family for over three years by their estranged pious grandmother. Read more...
Mario Orlando Hardy Hamlet Brenno Benedetti Farrugia (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈmaɾjo βeneˈðeti] (listen); 14 September 1920 – 17 May 2009),
known as Mario Benedetti, was a Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet as well as being an integral member of the Generación del 45. Despite publishing more than 80 books and being published in twenty languages he was not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he was considered one of Latin America's most important writers of the latter half of the 20th century. Read more...- Penelope Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was an English Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. In 2008, The Times included her in a list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2012, The Observer named her final novel, The Blue Flower one of "the ten best historical novels". Read more...
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohm (24 August 1872 – 20 May 1956) was an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist under the signature Max. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting, are in many public collections. Read more...
Helen Dunmore FRSL (12 December 1952 – 5 June 2017) was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer. She won the National Poetry Competition award. Read more...
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known internationally for his works of historical fiction. He has been described as one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century.
He wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama. They included the award-winning novels Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). These, like many of his other works, placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, with known historical figures, and often used different narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination. Read more...
William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature.
After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling on the alternate history novel The Difference Engine (1990), which became an important work of the science fiction subgenre steampunk. In the 1990s, Gibson composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which explored the sociological developments of near-future urban environments, postindustrial society, and late capitalism. Following the turn of the century and the events of 9/11, Gibson emerged with a string of increasingly realist novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010)—set in a roughly contemporary world. These works saw his name reach mainstream bestseller lists for the first time. His more recent novel, The Peripheral (2014), returned to a more overt engagement with technology and recognizable science fiction concerns. Read more...
Patrick Victor Martindale White (28 May 1912 – 30 September 1990) was an Australian writer who, from 1935 to 1987, published 12 novels, three short-story collections and eight plays.
White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation, the first and so far only Australian to have been awarded the prize. White was also the inaugural recipient of the Miles Franklin Award. Read more...- Charles Frazier (born November 4, 1950) is an American novelist. He won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction for Cold Mountain. Read more...
- Edward James Hughes OM OBE FRSL (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation, and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He served as Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Some feminists and some American admirers of Plath, among others, blamed him for her death after the revelation of letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963, which claim that Hughes beat Plath two days before she had a miscarriage in 1961, and that he also told Plath he wished that she was dead. His last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem discovered in October 2010, "Last Letter", describes what happened during the three days before her death. Read more...
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Selected 21st-century writers
Anita Diamant (born June 27, 1951) is an American author of fiction and non-fiction books. She has published five novels, the most recent of which is The Boston Girl, a New York Times best seller. She is best known for her 1997 novel The Red Tent, which eventually became a best seller and book club favorite. She has also written six guides to contemporary Jewish practice, including The New Jewish Wedding, Living a Jewish Life, and The New Jewish Baby Book, as well as a collection of personal essays, Pitching My Tent. Read more...- Susanna Kearsley (born in Brantford, Ontario) is a New York Times best-selling Canadian novelist of historical fiction and mystery, as well as thrillers under the pen name Emma Cole. In 2014, she received Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for Best Paranormal Romance for The Firebird. Read more...
- William Trevor KBE (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. Read more...
Bhalchandra Vanaji Nemade (born 1938) is a Marathi writer, poet, critic and linguistic scholar from Maharashtra, India. Beginning with his debut novel Kosala, Nemade brought new dimensions to the world of Marathi literature. This was followed by a tetralogy consisting of novels Bidhar, Hool, Jareela and Jhool. In 2013, Nemade published his magnum opus titled Hindu: Jagnyachi Samruddha Adgal (Marathi: हिंदू: जगण्याची समृद्ध अडगळ) which is regarded as his masterpiece. Nemade is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award as well as the Jnanapith Award, the highest literary honour in India. In 2013, he was awarded the Padma Shri. Read more...- Lesley Kagen is an American, Milwaukee native, and national bestselling novelist. Her first book, Whistling in the Dark, 2007, which takes place in a Milwaukee neighborhood, made the New York Times Best Seller list. Her novels are written from the viewpoints of children or young narrators, capturing the "kids' honesty, their unique way of viewing the world, their direct way of talking, [and] their enthusiasm." Common themes in her stories, which are set in the 1950s and 1960s, include: dealing with loss, family, mystery, discovering the truth, inner-workings of a community, sibling bonds, childlike perception, innocence and corruption. Read more...
Mark Helprin (born June 28, 1947) is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend". Read more...
Judith Lewis (née Rumelt, born July 27, 1973), better known by her pen name Cassandra Clare, is an American author of young adult fiction, best known for her bestselling series The Mortal Instruments. Read more...- Amit Majmudar is an American novelist and poet. In 2015, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Ohio. Read more...
Donald Mitchell Brown, Jr. (born June 3, 1960) is an American author of thirteen published books, including eleven published novels, and two works of military non-fiction, Call Sign Extortion 17: The Shoot-Down of SEAL Team Six and the national bestseller,The Last Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Final Combat Mission of World War II.
He is perhaps best known for his bestselling novel, Treason released by Zondervan Publishing Company in 2005, and by his non-fiction military expose, Call Sign Extortion 17: The Shoot-Down of SEAL Team Six, released by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Company in 2015. Treason explored the issues and dangers of radical Islamic infiltration in the US military.Call Sign Extortion 17 is a non-fiction account of the 2011 Chinook shootdown in Afghanistan of U.S.Navy SEAL Team, with Brown contending that the SEAL's deaths were caused, in part, because of "politically-correct" rules of engagement. Read more...
Ford at the Göteborg Book Fair 2013
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. His novel Wildlife was adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. Read more...
Mary Pope Osborne (born May 20, 1949) is an American author of children's books. She is best known for the award-winning and bestselling Magic Tree House series, which has been translated into 35 languages and has sold more than 134 million copies worldwide. She is an advocate and supporter of children’s literacy, and the award-winning author of more than 100 books for children and young adults, including novels, retellings of mythology and folklore, picture books, biographies, and mysteries. Osborne is also the coauthor of the companion Magic Tree House Fact Trackers series with her husband, Will Osborne, and her sister, Natalie Pope Boyce. Read more...- John Burdett is a British crime novelist. He is the bestselling author of Bangkok 8 and its sequels, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts, The Godfather of Kathmandu, and Vulture Peak. His most recent novel in this series, The Bangkok Asset, was published on 4 August 2015. Read more...
- Kevin Powers (born July 11, 1980) is an American fiction writer, poet, and Iraq War veteran. Read more...
Edwidge Danticat (Haitian Creole pronunciation: [ɛdwidʒ dãtika]; born January 19, 1969) is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Read more...- Zlatko Topčić (born 30 April 1955) is a Bosnian screenwriter, playwright and novelist. He has written a number of films, including: Remake, The Abandoned, Miracle in Bosnia; theater plays: Time Out, I Don't Like Mondays, Refugees; novels: The Final Word, Dagmar, Nightmare.
His films have been screened at numerous international film festivals, including: Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno Festival, New York Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Hollywood Film Festival, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and many other. Read more... - Natsuo Kirino (桐野 夏生 Kirino Natsuo, born October 7, 1951 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture) is the pen name of Mariko Hashioka, a Japanese novelist and a leading figure in the recent boom of female writers of Japanese detective fiction. Read more...
Frank Delaney (24 October 1942 – 21 February 2017) was an Irish novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He was the author of the New York Times best-seller Ireland, the non-fiction book Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea, and many other works of fiction, non-fiction and collections. He was born in Tipperary, Ireland. Read more...
Lois Lowry (born Lois Ann Hammersberg; March 20, 1937) is an American writer credited with forty-five children's books. She has won two Newbery Medals, for Number the Stars in 1990 and The Giver in 1994. For her contribution as a children's writer, she was a finalist in 2000 and U.S. nominee again in 2004, as well as a finalist in 2016, for the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. Her book Gooney Bird Greene won the 2002 Rhode Island Children's Book Award.
In 2007, she received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for her contribution in writing for teens. In 2011 she gave the May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture; her lecture was titled "UNLEAVING: The Staying Power of Gold". She was also awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Brown University in 2014. Read more...- Peter Cameron (born November 29, 1959 in Pompton Plains, New Jersey) is an American novelist and writer living in New York City and Vermont. He is best known for his novels Andorra, The Weekend, The City of Your Final Destination, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, and Coral Glynn. Read more...
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Did you know...
- ... that the detective fiction writer Soeman Hs is considered a pioneer of the Indonesian short story for his collection Kawan Bergeloet?
- ... that the first female British professor of Greek, Dorothy Tarrant, analysed Plato's style to conclude that he did not write the Socratic dialogue on beauty?
- ... that Yiddish poet Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim began writing poetry to cheer up fellow inmates at the Kaiserwald concentration camp during World War II?
- ... that according to writer Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror episode "San Junipero" was set in California as a "fuck you" to people complaining that the show would become Americanised?
- ... that Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, author of Bad News for Outlaws, asked that US black deputy marshal Bass Reeves appear unclothed in an illustration to ensure its historical accuracy?
- ... that Christopher Little has been described as "the luckiest agent ever" for his association with Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling?
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Selected images
Globular envelope with a cluster of accountancy tokens, Uruk period, from Susa. Louvre Museum
The Rosetta Stone, with writing in three different scripts, was instrumental in deciphering Ancient Egyptian.
Narmer Palette, with the two serpopards representing unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, circa 3100 B.C.
Amulet of the Tărtăria tablets, the earliest found example of the Old European script and of human writing in the world generally, dating to 5500–5300 BC. It is a product of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture that was in Romania and neighbouring regions.
Alphabetic writing is a frequent category in human communication.
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In the news
- 12 February 2019 –
- King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden confirms the election of Finnish writer and poet Tua Forsström as a new member of the Swedish Academy, the body that formally decides the annual winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Swedish Academy)
Selected women writers
Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt (/ˈɛərənt,ˈɑːr-/; German: [ˈaːʁənt]; Hannah Arendt Bluecher; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was an American philosopher and political theorist. Her many books and articles on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology have had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century.
Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany but mostly raised in Königsberg in a secular merchant Jewish culture by parents who were politically progressive, being supporters of the Social Democrats. Her father died when she was seven, so she was raised by her mother and grandfather. After completing her secondary education, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief affair, and he had a lasting influence on her thinking. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy in 1929 at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. Read more...- Rachel Holmes Ingalls (13 May 1940 – 6 March 2019) is an American-born author who has lived in the United Kingdom, since 1965. She won the 1970 Authors' Club First Novel Award for Theft. Her novella Mrs. Caliban was published in 1982, and her book of short stories Times Like These in 2005.
Ingalls's short story "Last Act: The Madhouse" inspired the story of the character Jean in the 1997 film Chinese Box by Wayne Wang. Read more... 
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award, recognition as a gifted writer, and financial security. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths. Read more...
Bettina von Arnim as drawn by Ludwig Emil Grimm during the first decade of the 19th century
Bettina von Arnim (the Countess of Arnim) (4 April 1785 – 20 January 1859), born Elisabeth Catharina Ludovica Magdalena Brentano, was a German writer and novelist.
Bettina (as well: Bettine) Brentano was a writer, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist, an illustrator, patron of young talent, and a social activist. She was the archetype of the Romantic era's zeitgeist and the crux of many creative relationships of canonical artistic figures. Best known for the company she kept, she numbered among her closest friends Goethe, Beethoven, and Pückler and tried to foster artistic agreement among them. Many leading composers of the time, including Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johanna Kinkel, and Johannes Brahms, admired her spirit and talents. As a composer, von Arnim's style was unconventional, molding and melding favorite folk melodies and historical themes with innovative harmonies, phrase lengths, and improvisations that became synonymous with the music of the era. She was closely related to the German writers Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim: the first was her brother, the second her husband. Her daughter Gisela von Arnim became a prominent writer as well. Her nephews, via her brother Christian, were Franz and Lujo Brentano. Read more...- Leslie What (born Leslie Nelson, 1955) is a writer of fantasy and literary fiction and nonfiction. She grew up in Southern California and attended Santa Ana College, and earned a certificate in Vocational Nursing. She also attended California State University Fullerton and received her MFA in Writing from Pacific University in 2006.
She began publishing in 1992 with a story for Asimov's Science Fiction. In 1999 she won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story for The Cost of Doing Business, published in Amazing Stories. Her story collaboration with Eileen Gunn, "Nirvana High" was nominated for the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. She has published more than 80 short stories and essays, and her work has appeared in Parabola, Lilith Magazine, The Clackamas Review, Sci Fiction, Witpunk, Bending the Landscape, The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road, Midstream, Utne Reader, Calyx, Best New Horror, and other anthologies and magazines. Her collection "Crazy Love" was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award Ken Kesey Fiction award in 2009. Read more... - Sinikka Laine-Törmänen (born 17 October 1945 in Riihimäki, Finland) is a Finnish author primarily of young adult fiction. Her first novel Ohari was published in 1982.
Laine has won many literary awards and her novel Tyttö tuulesta, poika pimeästä (1986) won the Finnish state literature award (Finnish: Valtion kirjallisuuspalkinto). Read more... - Lisa Robertson (born July 22, 1961) is a Canadian poet. She lived for many years in Vancouver, briefly in Oakland, California, and currently lives in France. Read more...
Monica Ali (born 20 October 1967) is a Bangladeshi-born British writer and novelist. In 2003, she was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta magazine based on her unpublished manuscript; her debut novel, Brick Lane, was published later that year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. She has also published three other novels. Read more...
Claimed to be "the only permanent memorial in the whole country to the memory of Celia Fiennes", this "Waymark" stands in No Man's Heath, Cheshire
Celia Fiennes (7 June 1662 – 10 April 1741) was an English traveller. Born at Newton Tony, Wiltshire, she was the daughter of Nathaniel Fiennes, an English Civil War Parliamentarian colonel and his second wife Frances née Whitehead. Nathaniel was in turn the second son of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele. Read more...- Charmaine Pereira is a writer and feminist scholar in Abuja, Nigeria. Her work centers on feminist thought, sexuality, gender education, and civil society and the state. Pereira is also a coordinator for the Initiative for Women’s Studies in Nigeria. She is a member of Tapestry Consulting, an organization that seeks to create gender equality in the workplace in Africa. Read more...
Celine Axelos (née Tasso; 1902–1992) was an Egyptian poet, public speaker, and woman of letters. Her older brother, René Tasso (1897–1920), was also a poet of distinction who, however, died at the young age of twenty-two from tuberculosis.
Her father was a middle class functionary of Lebanese extraction. Celine was the eldest of four girls, and lived her entire life in Alexandria, Egypt, leaving only for brief trips to the United States (once), Lebanon (generally to visit her son's family), and France. Read more...
Judith Kerr, OBE (surname pronounced /ˈkɑːr/ KAR German pronunciation: [kɛʁ]; born 14 June 1923) is a British writer and illustrator. She has created both enduring picture books such as the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea and acclaimed novels for older children such as the semi-autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which gave a child's-eye view of the Second World War. Born in Germany, of Jewish background, she came to Britain with her family in 1933 amid the rise of the Nazis. Read more...
Gaele Sobott (born 1956) is an Australian author of short stories, non-fiction and children's books. Read more...- Irene Levine Paull (April 18, 1908 – 1981) was a writer and labor activist from Minnesota. She responded to discrimination by fighting for the rights of people who were oppressed. She was active in labor organizing and Communist politics, and she insisted that women could travel and write professionally just as men could. She founded the newspaper that became the Minneapolis Labor Review, penned columns under feminine pseudonyms, and wrote poetry, plays, and fiction that addressed themes of injustice. Read more...
- Lolita Euson (27 October 1914 – 13 August 1994) was a Dutch Antillean writer and poet. She was invested as a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau, and streets in both Sint Eustatisus and San Nicolaas, Aruba, bear her name. In 1996, she was memorialized by an Arubian stamp, which depicts her likeness. Read more...
- Alice Oswald (born 1966) is a British poet from Reading, Berkshire. Her work won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. In September 2017, she was named as BBC Radio 4's second Poet-in-Residence, succeeding Daljit Nagra. Read more...
Faltonia Proba teaching the history of the world since the Creation through her Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi. Miniature from a 15th-century manuscript of the De mulieribus claris by Giovanni Boccaccio
Faltonia Betitia Proba (c. AD 306/315 – c. 353/366) was a Latin Roman Christian poet, perhaps the earliest female Christian poet whose work survives. A member of one of the most influential aristocratic families, she composed the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, a cento composed with verses by Virgil re-ordered to form an epic poem centred on the life of Jesus. Read more...- Georgina Castle Smith (née Georgina Meyrick, pseudonym Brenda, 9 May 1845 – 27 December 1933) was a popular, productive English writer of didactic children's books. Some of her books highlighted the social needs of "street arabs" (homeless children) and encouraged people to donate clothing and food to them. Read more...
- Hanya Yanagihara (born September 20, 1974) is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. Read more...
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