Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#151

Ally Condie

#20369

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Allyson Braithwaite Condie is an author of young adult and middle grade fiction. Her novel Matched was a #1 New York Times and international bestseller, and spent over a year on the New York Times Bestseller List. The sequels are also New York Times bestsellers. Matched was chosen as one of YALSA's 2011 Teens' Top Ten and named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2010. All three books are available in 30+ languages.

#152

Carolyn See

#9145

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Carolyn See was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.

#153

Julia Alvarez

#12994

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Julia Alvarez is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents , In the Time of the Butterflies , and Yo! . Her publications as a poet include Homecoming and The Woman I Kept to Myself , and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare . She has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale and many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant contemporary Latina writers.

#154

Paula Vogel

#8203

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Paula Vogel is an American playwright who received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. From 2008 to 2012, Vogel was Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting and department chair at the Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

#155

Mahasweta Devi

#6696

Overall Influence

1926 - 2016 (90 years)

Mahasweta Devi was an Indian writer in Bengali and an activist. Her notable literary works include Hajar Churashir Maa, Rudali, and Aranyer Adhikar. She was a leftist who worked for the rights and empowerment of the tribal people of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. She was honoured with various literary awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award , Jnanpith Award and Ramon Magsaysay Award along with India's civilian awards Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan.

#156

Helen Edmundson

#4983

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Helen Edmundson is a British playwright, screenwriter and producer. She has won awards and critical acclaim both for her original writing and for her adaptations of various literary classics for the stage and screen.

#157

Susan Sontag

#8888

Overall Influence

1933 - 2004 (71 years)

Susan Lee Sontag was an American writer, critic, and public intellectual. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation , On Photography , Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others, as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now , The Volcano Lover , and In America .

#158

Mary Louise Pratt

#10531

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Mary Louise Pratt is a Silver Professor and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto in 1970, her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana in 1971, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1975.

#159

Mary Beard

#3626

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English scholar of Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of Classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.

#160

Carol Shields

#11047

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.

#161

Jennifer Egan

#15210

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America.

#162

Deborah E. McDowell

Deborah E. McDowell

#23828

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Deborah E. McDowell is a scholar, author and member of the University of Virginia faculty since 1987 where she serves as the Alice Griffin professor of Literary Studies. In 2008 professor McDowell was named director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, at the University of Virginia.

#163

Malorie Blackman

Malorie Blackman

#10844

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Malorie Blackman is a British writer who held the position of Children's Laureate from 2013 to 2015. She primarily writes literature and television drama for children and young adults. She has used science fiction to explore social and ethical issues. Her critically and popularly acclaimed Noughts and Crosses series uses the setting of a fictional alternative Britain to explore racism. Blackman has been the recipient of many honours for her work including, most recently, the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize.

#164

Minae Mizumura

#18018

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

is a Japanese novelist. Among other literary awards, she has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize. Early life Born into a middle-class family in Tokyo, she moved to Long Island, New York at the age of twelve. Her years of reading and re-reading European literature during her childhood in post war Japan, and modern Japanese literature while attending American high school, later became the foundation for her novels. After studying studio art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and French at Sorbonne in Paris, she went on to Yale College, majoring in French. W...

#165

Jane Smiley

#10866

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres . Biography Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Community School and from John Burroughs School. She obtained a BA in literature at Vassar College , then earned an MA , MFA , and PhD from the University of Iowa. While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops.

#166

Mary Gaitskill

#11309

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories . Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior and Veronica , which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

#167

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye

#15725

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.

#168

Rainbow Rowell

#16106

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (51 years)

Rainbow Rowell is an American author known for young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her young adult novels Eleanor & Park , Fangirl and Carry On have been subjects of critical acclaim. She was the writer of the 2017 revival of Marvel Comics' Runaways and is currently the writer for She-Hulk.

#169

Terry McMillan

#7134

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Her work centers around the experiences of Black women in the United States. Early life McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan. She received a B.A. degree in journalism in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. She also attended the Master of Fine Arts program in film at Columbia University.

#170

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

#15180

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

#171

Dale Spender

#8547

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dale Spender was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the cont...

#172

Naomi Alderman

#11215

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.

#173

Rae Armantrout

#15969

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed which was also nominated for the National Book Award. Versed later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

#174

Mimi Reisel Gladstein

Mimi Reisel Gladstein

#5495

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Mimi Reisel Gladstein is a professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her specialties include authors such as Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck, as well as women's studies, theatre arts and 18th-century British literature. In 2011 she was named to the El Paso Historical Hall of Honor.

#175

Kathleen Raine

#5015

Overall Influence

1908 - 2003 (95 years)

Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.

#176

Kelly Link

#17731

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Kelly Link is an American editor and author of short stories. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and realism. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo award, three Nebula awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

#177

Nina Berberova

#15007

Overall Influence

1901 - 1993 (92 years)

Nina Nikolayevna Berberova was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of anti-communist Russian refugees in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia. Her 1965 revision of the Constance Garnett translation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with Leonard J. Kent is considered the best translation so far by the academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit.

#178

Maria Luisa Spaziani

Maria Luisa Spaziani

#19196

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Maria Luisa Spaziani was an Italian poet. Biography Spaziani was born in Turin. At nineteen, she founded the review Il dado, working with collaborators such as Vasco Pratolini, Sandro Penna and Vincenzo Ciaffi. Virginia Woolf sent her a chapter of her novel The Waves, autographed to Alla piccola direttrice . Spaziani did not contribute her own poems, however, feeling that they were not of sufficient quality.

#179

Elaine Scarry

#6505

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Elaine Scarry is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law. She was formerly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

#180

Eva Hoffman

#11903

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Eva Hoffman is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic. Early life and education Eva Hoffman was born in Kraków, Poland, shortly after World War II. Her parents, Boris and Maria Wydra, survived the Holocaust by hiding in a forest bunker and then by being hidden by Polish and Ukrainian neighbours. In 1959, at the age of 13, she emigrated with her parents and sister to Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University.

#181

Lorrie Moore

#15441

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing. Biography Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. The story, "Raspberries," was published in January 1977. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.

#182

Anita Desai

#12415

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Anita Desai , born Anita Mazumdar , is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea . Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board...

#183

Sara Paretsky

#7107

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski. Life and career Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa. Her father was a microbiologist and moved the family to Kansas in 1951 after taking a job at the University of Kansas, where Paretsky eventually graduated. The family rented an old farm house. Her relationship with her parents was strained; her mother was an alcoholic and her father was a harsh disciplinarian.

#184

Merrill Markoe

#14698

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Merrill Markoe is an American author, television writer, and occasional standup comedian. Early life Markoe was born in New York City. Her family moved several times including stays in Miami, Florida and San Francisco, California. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a B.A. in Art in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. Her first job after leaving the university was teaching art at the University of Southern California.

#185

Caryl Emerson

#12109

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Emerson was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University from 1988 until her retirement in 2015. From 1980 to 1987 she was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.

#186

Liz Lochhead

#10435

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Liz Lochhead Hon FRSE is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster. Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, and served as Poet Laureate for Glasgow between 2005 and 2011.

#187

Antjie Krog

#8156

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Antjie Krog is a South African writer and academic, best known for her Afrikaans poetry, her reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her 1998 book Country of My Skull. In 2004, she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape as Extraordinary Professor.

#188

Barbara Cartland

Barbara Cartland

#7850

Overall Influence

1901 - 2000 (99 years)

Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, was an English writer, known as the Queen of Romance, who published both contemporary and historical romance novels, the latter set primarily during the Victorian or Edwardian period. Cartland is one of the best-selling authors worldwide of the 20th century.

#189

Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier

#10248

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Tracy Rose Chevalier is an American-British novelist. She is best known for her second novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was adapted as a 2003 film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth.

#190

June Jordan

#10479

Overall Influence

1936 - 2002 (66 years)

June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.

#191

Monique Wittig

#6461

Overall Influence

1935 - 2003 (68 years)

Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères , was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

#192

Yiyun Li

#16024

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.

#193

Sue Townsend

#11053

Overall Influence

1946 - 2014 (68 years)

Susan Lillian Townsend was an English writer and humorist whose work encompasses novels, plays and works of journalism. She was best known for creating the character Adrian Mole. After writing in secret from the age of 14, Townsend first became known for her plays, her signature character first appearing in a radio drama, but her work soon expanded into other forms. She enjoyed great success in the 1980s, with her Adrian Mole books selling more copies than any other work of fiction in Britain during the decade. This series, which eventually encompassed nine books, takes the form of the character's diaries.

#194

Terry Tempest Williams

#7429

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Terry Tempest Williams , is an American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of Utah. Her work focuses on social and environmental justice ranging from issues of ecology and the protection of public lands and wildness, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature. She writes in the genre of creative nonfiction and the lyrical essay.

#195

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

#17713

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.

#196

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

#20998

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. She began her career writing short stories and plays, which were often censored by the Soviet government, and following perestroika, published a number of well-respected works of prose.

#197

Ruth Padel

#16911

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.

#198

Maria Tatar

#15524

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Maria Magdalene Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.

#199

Marlene van Niekerk

Marlene van Niekerk

#17716

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Marlene van Niekerk is a South African poet, writer, and academic. She is best known for her novels, the satirical tragicomedy Triomf and the Hertzog-winning Agaat , which explore themes including the family, the change in power dynamics occasioned by the end of Apartheid, and inequalities of race, gender, and class. Van Niekerk is also an award-winning poet. She writes in her native tongue, Afrikaans, and teaches at Stellenbosch University.

#200

Cynthia Haven

#8768

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist. Her books include of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the top books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and a visiting scholar at Stanford Un...

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