Thinkers Timeline

Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, feminist political leader, soldier, and public intellectual. She is widely regarded as the founding mother of the modern Turkish novel and one of Turkey's most important twentieth-century writers. She was born in Istanbul in 1884 to an upper-class Ottoman family. Her father was a secretary to Sultan Abdülhamid II. The family was associated with the Dönmeh, a community of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who maintained some Sabbatean traditions privately. She was educated at home by tutors in Ottoman and European literature, religion, philosophy, sociology, piano, English, French, and Arabic, and briefly attended the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She began writing journalism and fiction in her early twenties. She divorced her first husband in 1910 when he took a second wife, an unusual act of defiance against polygamy in late Ottoman society. She married the politician and physician Adnan Adıvar in 1917. During the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) she became one of the movement's most powerful voices: she addressed the famous Sultanahmet rally in 1919 against Greek occupation, then went to Anatolia to join Mustafa Kemal's nationalist forces. She served as a corporal and later as a sergeant-major, working as a press officer and translator. She wrote about the war in The Turkish Ordeal. Her relationship with Mustafa Kemal soured after independence. As his single-party regime tightened, she and her husband went into exile in Britain and France in 1926. She did not return to Turkey for fourteen years. She wrote extensively in English during exile, including her two-volume Memoirs (1926, 1928). She returned to Turkey in 1939, served as the first woman professor at Istanbul University from 1940 to 1950, and was elected to the National Assembly from 1950 to 1954. She died in Istanbul on 9 January 1964.

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English writer, journalist, and essayist. He is one of the most quoted writers of the 20th century. He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal region of British India. His father worked for the British colonial government. His mother brought him back to England when he was a small child. He grew up in modest circumstances in what he later called the 'lower-upper-middle class'. He won scholarships to good English schools, ending up at Eton, one of the most elite schools in the country. He did not do well there academically. Instead of going to university, in 1922 he sailed to Burma (now Myanmar) and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He served for five years. What he saw changed his life. He watched British officers beat and humiliate Burmese people. He took part in colonial rule himself. He came to hate it. In 1927, he left the police, returned to England, and began writing. For years he was poor. He lived with tramps in London, washed dishes in Paris, picked hops in Kent, and taught in small schools. This experience became the material for his first books, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper. His account of the war, Homage to Catalonia (1938), is one of the great books of 20th-century political writing. He spent the Second World War in London, working for the BBC and writing. His two most famous books came in his last years. Animal Farm (1945) was a satire on the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was a novel about totalitarian rule. He had tuberculosis throughout these years. He died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46, soon after finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, and political thinker from Martinique, an island in the Caribbean that was, and still is, a French territory. He was born into a poor family but won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he became one of the most brilliant students of his generation. In Paris in the 1930s, he and other Black students from Africa and the Caribbean came together to talk about their shared experience of being treated as inferior by French colonial culture. From these conversations came the Negritude movement: a literary and political project that celebrated African and Black culture, history, and identity as something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Césaire returned to Martinique and became its most important political figure, serving as mayor of the capital Fort-de-France for nearly fifty years and as a member of the French parliament. He is best known for two works: his poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his political essay Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1950. He died in 2008 at the age of 94, still celebrated as Martinique's greatest son.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French-Algerian novelist, playwright, and philosopher. He was born in Mondovi in French colonial Algeria into a poor working-class family: his father was killed in the First World War when Camus was less than a year old and his mother was partially deaf and nearly illiterate. He grew up in poverty in Algiers, where he was a gifted student whose high school teacher, Louis Germain, helped him win a scholarship that changed the course of his life. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers but contracted tuberculosis, which prevented him from taking his final examinations and recurred throughout his life. He worked as a journalist in Algeria and then in Paris, became involved in the French Resistance during the German occupation, and published his most important works in the 1940s: the novel The Stranger, the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the plague novel La Peste, and the philosophical essay The Rebel. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, when he was forty-three years old. He died in a car accident in 1960. He was forty-six.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Aboriginal Australian poet, activist, teacher, and artist. She was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of poetry. Her work helped shape modern Aboriginal political and cultural identity. She was born in 1920 on Stradbroke Island, off the coast of Queensland in eastern Australia. The island is called Minjerribah in her language. Her birth name was Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska. In 1988, the year of Australia's bicentennial, she changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal. 'Oodgeroo' is the Noonuccal word for 'paperbark', a tree common on her island. 'Noonuccal' is the name of her people. The name change was a public political act. She wanted a name that came from her own land, not from English colonisers. She grew up in poverty under harsh laws that controlled Aboriginal lives. Aboriginal Australians could not vote, marry without permission, or move freely. Her family lived on government rations. She left school at 13 to work as a domestic servant in white households. During World War II she joined the Australian Women's Army Service, one of the first Aboriginal women to do so. In 1964 she published her first poetry book, We Are Going. It sold out quickly. She became a major activist for Aboriginal rights. She helped lead the campaign for the 1967 referendum that finally allowed Aboriginal Australians to be counted as citizens. She wrote books for children, painted, and ran a cultural centre on her island. She died in 1993, aged 72. Her son Vivian taught and worked alongside her.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. He was born in Harlem, New York, the eldest of nine children. His mother's partner, David Baldwin, a storefront preacher, was a powerful and terrifying figure in his childhood, and the tensions between religious passion and the world's brutality run through all of Baldwin's work. He grew up in poverty in Harlem during the Depression, was a gifted student who discovered books and libraries as a way out of the world around him, and became a junior preacher at fourteen. By seventeen he had left the church, though its language and rhythms never left his writing. In 1948, at twenty-four, he left the United States for Paris, driven away by the daily humiliations and the constant threat of racial violence. He spent much of his adult life in France but never stopped writing about and returning to America. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953, and was followed by Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, among others. His essay collections — Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street — are among the most important works of American prose in the twentieth century. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France in 1987.

Noémia de Sousa was a Mozambican poet and journalist who is widely called 'the mother of Mozambican poetry'. She was born Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares in 1926 in Catembe, a coastal village just across the bay from what was then Lourenço Marques and is now Maputo. Her father was of mixed race and her mother had Portuguese roots; she grew up between worlds, neither fully accepted by colonial European society nor straightforwardly identified with the African majority. The position shaped her writing. Her father died when she was eight. Two of her brothers were already studying in Lisbon. She finished her own studies at a commercial school in Lourenço Marques. By her late teens she was already writing poetry and political journalism for O Brado Africano, the most important pro-African newspaper in colonial Mozambique. She edited the women's pages. Her poems began to circulate in literary circles across the Portuguese-speaking world. She wrote her major poetic work in just three years, between 1948 and 1951, when she was in her early twenties. In 1951 the Portuguese colonial authorities exiled her to Portugal. She was 25. She would never live in Mozambique again. She lived in Lisbon from 1951 to 1964, then in Paris from 1964 to 1973, working as a translator and journalist throughout. She returned to Lisbon after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Her single poetry collection, Sangue Negro (Black Blood), circulated in samizdat form for decades. It was finally published in book form by the Mozambican Writers' Association in 2001, when she was 75. She died in Cascais, Portugal, in 2002. Her body was returned to Mozambique.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was an American poet, memoirist, essayist, and public figure whose seven-volume autobiography and body of poetry made her one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century. She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St Louis, Missouri. After her parents' marriage ended, she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. At seven, during a visit to her mother, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend; after testifying against him, she stopped speaking for nearly five years. She returned to Stamps and, under the patient attention of a neighbour who introduced her to literature, gradually found her voice again. She left school at sixteen, became San Francisco's first Black streetcar conductor, and gave birth to her son Guy that same year. Over the following decades she worked as a singer, dancer, actor, journalist, activist, and eventually writer. She lived in Ghana in the 1960s and worked closely with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr in the American civil rights movement. In 1969 she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which became one of the most widely taught books in American schools and has been translated into many languages. She published six further autobiographical volumes, ten books of poetry, essays, plays, and children's books. She recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, the first inaugural poem in over thirty years. She taught for decades at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and died there in 2014, aged eighty-six.

Tayeb Salih (al-Tayyib Salih) was a Sudanese novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, widely considered one of the most important Arab writers of the twentieth century. He was born on 12 July 1929 in the village of Karmakol, on the Nile near al-Dabbah in northern Sudan. He came from a family of small farmers and religious teachers. He attended a Quranic school as a boy, then continued at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (which became the University of Khartoum), where he took a Bachelor of Science degree. He planned to work in agriculture. After a brief period as a schoolteacher in Sudan he won a scholarship to study in London. He never returned to live permanently in Sudan. He spent the rest of his working life abroad, primarily in Britain. He worked for over a decade at the BBC's Arabic Service, eventually becoming Head of Drama. He served as Director-General of Information in Doha, Qatar. He spent his last working years at UNESCO in Paris, including time as UNESCO's representative for the Arab Gulf states. For more than a decade he wrote a weekly column for the London-based Arabic magazine al-Majalla, ranging widely across Arabic and world literature. In 1965 he married Julia Maclean, a Scottish woman; they had three daughters and lived in southwest London. His literary output was small but extraordinarily influential. He published the short story collection A Handful of Dates (1964), the novella The Wedding of Zein (1966), the masterpiece Season of Migration to the North (Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal, 1966), and the two-part novel Bandarshah (Daw al-Bayt, 1971; Maryud, 1976). In 2001 the Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named Season of Migration to the North the most important Arabic novel of the twentieth century. He died of kidney failure in London on 18 February 2009 at age 79. His body was returned to Sudan and buried at al-Bakri Cemetery in Omdurman.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She is one of the most important writers of science fiction and fantasy in any language. She was born on 21 October 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were unusual. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, was a famous anthropologist who had studied the native peoples of California. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, was a writer who later produced Ishi in Two Worlds, a book about the last survivor of a California tribe. Their home was full of books, Indigenous friends, and long conversations about other cultures. This upbringing shaped everything Le Guin later wrote. She studied at Radcliffe College and at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature. In 1953, travelling by ship to France on a Fulbright scholarship, she met the historian Charles Le Guin. They married and eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised three children. She lived in Portland for most of her life. She began publishing fiction in the early 1960s. Her breakthrough came with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a fantasy novel about a young wizard. It has never gone out of print. The following year, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagined a world where people are neither male nor female most of the time. The Dispossessed (1974) imagined an anarchist society on a moon, seen in dialogue with a capitalist society on the planet it orbits. These three books alone would have made her a major writer. She wrote more than twenty novels, many stories, essays, and poems over six decades. She also translated. Her English version of the Daodejing, the ancient Chinese Daoist text, was published in 1997 and is one of the most admired. She died on 22 January 2018 in Portland, aged 88. She had been writing almost until the end.

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, critic, and professor. He was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in Ogidi, in southeastern Nigeria, into an Igbo family. His father was a Christian teacher and Achebe grew up between two worlds: the Igbo traditions of his community and the colonial educational system that his father served. He studied at the University College of Ibadan, which was part of the University of London at the time, and began writing his first novel while still a student. Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 on the eve of Nigerian independence, told the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo man, and his community's encounter with British colonialism. It has become the most widely read African novel ever published, translated into over sixty languages and read by millions of people worldwide. Achebe also wrote several other novels, poetry, essays, and children's books, and taught at universities in Nigeria, the United States, and elsewhere. His essay collection Morning Yet on Creation Day and his later essays in Home and Exile are essential statements of his views on African literature and its relationship to colonialism. He died in 2013 at the age of eighty-two.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, into a Black working-class family with deep roots in African American storytelling traditions. She studied at Howard University and Cornell, and worked for many years as an editor at Random House, where she championed and shaped major works of African American literature. She began writing fiction in her thirties, while raising two children alone after her marriage ended. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She went on to write ten novels in all, each one formally adventurous and morally demanding. Beloved (1987), her most celebrated work, is based on the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Song of Solomon, Sula, Jazz, and Paradise each explore different dimensions of Black American life and history with extraordinary formal invention. She also wrote important critical essays, most notably Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which examined how African American presence had shaped and was systematically ignored in American literature. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She died in 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim was a Sudanese feminist, socialist, writer, and political leader. She was the first woman elected to the Sudanese parliament and, according to several sources, the first woman elected to any African parliament. She led the Sudanese Women's Union, one of the largest women's organisations on the African continent, for much of the second half of the twentieth century. She was born in Khartoum in 1933 (some sources give 1928 or 1932) and died in London on 12 August 2017 at age 84. Her funeral in Khartoum a few days later drew large crowds. She came from an educated Sudanese family. Her grandfather had been headmaster of the first Sudanese school for boys and an imam. Her father was a teacher who graduated from Gordon Memorial College and was expelled from a government school for refusing to teach in English. Her mother was among the first generation of Sudanese girls to receive formal schooling. Fatima attended Omdurman Girls' Secondary School, where she founded a wall newspaper called al-Ra'ida (The Pioneer) and led the first women's strike in Sudan, against the school's decision to replace science classes with 'home economics'. The strike won. The pattern of organising and winning began early. In 1947 she founded the Intellectual Women's Association. In 1952 she helped found the Sudanese Women's Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa'i al-Sudani, SWU). She joined the Sudanese Communist Party in 1954 and served on its Central Committee. In 1965, after Sudanese women won the vote, she was elected to parliament. She campaigned successfully for equal pay, maternity leave, women's suffrage, and other reforms. Multiple Sudanese regimes banned the SWU. She was held under house arrest under Nimeiri. After Bashir's 1989 coup she went into exile in London, leading the SWU from abroad. She returned to Sudan in 2005 and served briefly in parliament again. She received the UN Human Rights Award in 1993 and the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2006.

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Native American scholar, writer, and activist. He was the most influential Native American intellectual of the 20th century. His books changed how Native Americans were studied in universities and how Native communities thought about themselves. He was born in 1933 in Martin, South Dakota. He came from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The Sioux are also known by their own names, including Lakota and Dakota. His family had a long history of leadership. His grandfather was a Yankton Sioux man named Tipi Sapa. His father, Vine Deloria Sr., was an Episcopal priest, one of the first Native American priests in that church. His aunt was the writer and historian Ella Deloria. The family combined deep involvement in the Christian church with deep loyalty to Sioux traditions. The combination shaped Vine Jr.'s thinking. He studied at Iowa State University and then at the Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois. He earned a master's degree in theology in 1963. He also earned a law degree in 1970. He served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967, the major political organisation for Native nations. His first book, Custer Died for Your Sins, came out in 1969. It was an angry, funny, wide-ranging attack on how white America treated Native Americans. It became a major bestseller. He went on to write more than 20 books on law, religion, science, and history. He taught at several universities, ending at the University of Colorado. He died of cancer in 2005, aged 72. His son Philip Deloria is also a leading scholar.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist whose work insisted on the interconnection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the analysis of power. She was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City to parents who had emigrated from Grenada in the Caribbean. She dropped the y from her name as a child, preferring the symmetry of Audre Lorde. She grew up in Harlem during the Depression, attended Hunter College and Columbia University, and worked as a librarian while beginning to publish her poetry. Her first book of poems appeared in 1968. She went on to publish ten further poetry collections, three prose books including the autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and a large body of essays and speeches gathered in Sister Outsider and other volumes. She taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and later held a long professorship in English at Hunter College in New York. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and wrote The Cancer Journals, one of the first serious public accounts of the experience. She lived for a period in the Caribbean island of St Croix, where she continued her writing and political organising. She died of liver cancer in 1992, aged fifty-eight. She described herself, in a phrase that became famous, as a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet — refusing to be reduced to any single part of that identity.

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic, public intellectual, and music critic. He was one of the founders of postcolonial studies. He was born on 1 November 1935 in Jerusalem, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. His family was Palestinian Christian. His father was a successful businessman with American citizenship. The family lived between Jerusalem and Cairo. In 1948, the State of Israel was created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced. Said's family lost their home in Jerusalem. He was 12. The family settled in Cairo, where he attended British and American schools. At 15, he was sent to boarding school in the United States. He studied at Princeton and then at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in English literature in 1964. He taught at Columbia University in New York for most of his career, from 1963 until his death. His early work was on European literature, especially Joseph Conrad. In 1978 he published Orientalism, the book that changed his life and founded a new field of study. It argued that Western scholarship about the Middle East had created a false and damaging image of the region. He was also a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights. He served for fourteen years on the Palestinian National Council. He wrote about music as a critic and was an accomplished pianist. With the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings young Arab and Israeli musicians together. He died of leukaemia on 25 September 2003 in New York, aged 67.

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language poets of the late twentieth century. He was born on 13 April 1939 at a farmhouse called Mossbawn, near Castledawson in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He was the eldest of nine children in a Catholic farming family. The family later moved to nearby Bellaghy. He grew up in a divided society. Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom but had a large Catholic minority who often felt unequal. The 'Troubles', a long period of violence between Catholics and Protestants, would later shape his work. As a clever child, he won a scholarship at age 12 to St Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry. He then studied English at Queen's University Belfast. His younger brother Christopher died at the age of four after being hit by a car. Heaney was 14. He later wrote one of his most loved poems, 'Mid-Term Break', about coming home for the funeral. He published his first major book of poems, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. It won prizes and made him famous. He continued to write for almost fifty years, producing twelve major collections plus translations. He taught at universities in Belfast, Dublin, Harvard, and Oxford. He married Marie Devlin in 1965; they had three children. He died on 30 August 2013, aged 74. His last words, sent by text to his wife in Latin, were 'Noli timere': do not be afraid.

Nora Vagi Brash OBE CMG was a Papua New Guinean playwright, poet, actress, and director, widely regarded as the country's foremost dramatist. She was the first major woman playwright in Papua New Guinean literature and one of the founders of modern PNG theatre. She wrote in a distinctive style that mixed Papua New Guinea's three national languages, Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin, and English, often within a single play, reflecting how Papua New Guineans actually speak in daily life. She was born in Dagoda village, Central Province, Papua New Guinea, into a Motuan family. The exact year of her birth is given variously as 1944 or in the late 1940s. She was educated locally and went on to teach at Kila Kila primary school, where she wrote her first performed play. She later returned to formal education and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from the University of Papua New Guinea in 1982. She had begun writing and performing in PNG's theatre scene in the early 1970s. She became a lecturer in puppetry, dance, and drama at the Creative Arts School in Port Moresby. She went on to become Artistic Director of the National Arts School and one of two artistic directors of the Papua New Guinea National Theatre Company. The Theatre Company toured villages across PNG to perform and raise social awareness, and toured internationally including to New Zealand, Nigeria, and England. Her most famous play, Which Way, Big Man? (1976), is widely studied across the Pacific. She wrote her first performed play, The High Cost of Living Differently, in 1975. Other major works include Black Market Buai, Sold Outright, Taurama (for which she received the PNG Independence Medal in 1985), Pick the Bone Dry, and City Spirits. She also wrote substantial poetry. She served as deputy chairperson of the PNG National Cultural Council and on the board of the Institute of PNG Studies. Oxford University Press published her collection Which Way Big Man? and Five Other Plays. She was awarded both an OBE and CMG. She died in April 2024, mourned across the Pacific theatre community.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.

Moisés Naím is a writer, political analyst, and journalist. He was born in 1952 in Tripoli, in Libya, into a Jewish family that later moved to Venezuela. He grew up in Venezuela and is Venezuelan. He trained first as an economist, earning a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Naím has had several careers. In Venezuela, he taught at a business school and served in government. He was the country's Minister of Trade and Industry and a director of its central bank. He also worked as an executive director at the World Bank. He then became a journalist and editor. For fourteen years he was editor-in-chief of the magazine 'Foreign Policy', which he turned into a modern, award-winning publication. He is now a widely read newspaper columnist, with columns published across many countries. Naím is best known for his books about power and politics in the modern world. His most famous are 'Illicit', about global crime, 'The End of Power', and 'The Revenge of Power', about modern strongman leaders. It is important to be clear about what kind of thinker Naím is. He is not a university researcher writing for other scholars. He is a public analyst and journalist. He once said he is a columnist before an analyst.

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, the first Turkish citizen to receive the prize. He is widely regarded as one of the major living novelists in any language. His books have sold over thirteen million copies and have been translated into more than sixty languages. He was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 into a wealthy, Westernised family. His grandfather had made a fortune in railways under the early Republic. His father was an engineer who also had unrealised literary ambitions. Pamuk grew up in the upmarket Nişantaşı neighbourhood of Istanbul, surrounded by books and the lingering melancholy of a fallen Ottoman world. He planned to be a painter through his teens. Family pressure pushed him toward a more practical career, and he enrolled in architecture at Istanbul Technical University. After three years he dropped out and shifted to journalism at the University of Istanbul, graduating in 1977. He had decided he wanted to write novels. He spent the next eight years writing in his parents' apartment, supported by his family. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons), was published in 1982 and won several Turkish literary prizes. His international breakthrough came with The Black Book (1990) and especially My Name Is Red (1998), set among Ottoman miniaturist painters in 1591. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006. In 2005 he was prosecuted under Turkey's Article 301 for telling a Swiss newspaper that 'thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it'. The charges were eventually dropped on a technicality, but death threats forced him to live with security and to spend significant time abroad. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 2007 while continuing to live primarily in Istanbul.

Mia Couto is a Mozambican novelist, poet, and biologist, the most internationally recognised living Mozambican writer. He was born António Emílio Leite Couto in 1955 in Beira, the second-largest city in what was then Portuguese-ruled Mozambique. His parents were Portuguese settlers; his father was a poet and journalist. The family was unusual among white settlers in their sympathy for the Mozambican African majority. The boy who became Mia took his nickname as a child, asking his family to call him 'Mia' because he so loved cats. He was 19 when Mozambique gained independence in 1975. He had begun studying medicine at the University of Lourenço Marques, but abandoned medicine after independence to work as a journalist for the new revolutionary state. He served as director of the Mozambican Information Agency, the daily Notícias, and the magazine Tempo during the early years of independence and the brutal civil war (1977-1992). He returned to university in his thirties and earned a degree in biology. He continues to work as an environmental consultant and ecologist alongside his literary career. His first book, a poetry collection, appeared in 1983. His first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (Sleepwalking Land), appeared in 1992 and was later named one of the twelve best African novels of the twentieth century. He has since written more than thirty books in many genres. He won the Camões Prize, the highest honour in Portuguese-language literature, in 2013, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes called the 'American Nobel', in 2014. He was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He still lives in Maputo.

Han Kang is a South Korean writer. In 2024 she became the first Asian woman, and the first Korean writer of any gender, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born on 27 November 1970 in the city of Gwangju in southern South Korea. According to her father, she is named after the Han River that flows through Seoul. Her family was full of writers. Her father, Han Seung-won, is a well-known novelist. Her two brothers also became novelists. Books filled their childhood home. Money, however, did not. Her father chose writing over a more secure career. When Han Kang was nine, the family moved from Gwangju to Seoul. Just four months later, in May 1980, the South Korean military launched a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju. Hundreds, possibly up to two thousand, civilians were killed. Han did not witness the massacre, but a photograph her father showed her years later marked her deeply. The events of Gwangju have shaped much of her later writing. She has spoken of carrying a kind of survivor's guilt. She studied Korean literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. She began publishing poetry in 1993 and her first novel in 1995. From 2007 to 2018 she taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Her novel The Vegetarian (2007), translated into English by Deborah Smith in 2015, won the International Booker Prize in 2016 and made her internationally famous. The Nobel followed in 2024. She still lives in Seoul.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian writer, journalist, and activist. She was born in 1970 in Montreal, Canada. Her family was Jewish and politically active. Her parents had moved to Canada from the United States, partly to protest against the Vietnam War. Klein is not an economist or an academic in the usual sense. She is a journalist and a writer of powerful, argumentative books about politics and the economy. Her work is a kind of campaigning journalism. She investigates, gathers evidence, and then makes a strong, clear argument meant to change how readers think. Klein became famous in 1999 with her first book, 'No Logo'. It studied the power of global brands and big corporations. Her later books include 'The Shock Doctrine' (2007), about crisis and free-market policy, and 'This Changes Everything' (2014), about climate change and capitalism. Klein is also an activist. She has taken part in protest movements and campaigns, especially around climate justice. She now teaches at university and helps lead a centre focused on climate justice. Klein is an influential and divisive figure. Many admire her as a fearless critic of corporate power. Others argue her books simplify complicated issues. Both views are part of an honest picture.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, musician, and activist. She is one of the most important contemporary indigenous thinkers in North America. She works on what is sometimes called indigenous resurgence: the recovery and renewal of indigenous languages, knowledge, and political life. She was born in 1971 in Canada. She belongs to Alderville First Nation, a Mississauga Nishnaabeg community in southern Ontario. The Mississauga Nishnaabeg are part of the larger Anishinaabe (also spelled Nishnaabeg) family of nations. The Anishinaabe are one of the largest indigenous peoples in North America. Their territory traditionally covered much of what is now the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States. They have lived there for thousands of years. Simpson grew up between worlds. She is part of an Anishinaabe community. She also lived in non-indigenous Canadian society. She studied biology and resource management at university, earning her PhD in 1999. She was trained in Western academic methods. She was also learning her own people's language, ceremonies, and intellectual traditions. The combination shaped her work. She brings academic rigour to indigenous knowledge while also pushing back against academic frameworks that distort what they study. She has written or edited around a dozen books. She has produced several music albums. She co-founded the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in the Northwest Territories, an indigenous educational institution. She was a major voice during the Idle No More movement that began in 2012, a wave of indigenous political action across Canada. She is now in her fifties and remains one of the most active indigenous thinkers and artists in North America.