The Most Influential People Across History
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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#501
Bernardine Evaristo
#7654
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Go to Profile#502
Christa Wolf
#6891
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Christa Wolf was a German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany. Biography Wolf was born the daughter of Otto and Herta Ihlenfeld, in Landsberg an der Warthe, then in the Province of Brandenburg. After World War II, her family, being Germans, were expelled from their home on what had become Polish territory. They crossed the new Oder-Neisse border in 1945 and settled in Mecklenburg, in what would become the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
Go to Profile#503
Paul Engle
#12482
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Paul Engle , was an American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as co-founder of the International Writing Program , both at the University of Iowa.
Go to Profile#504
Jan Morris
#4253
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Jan Morris was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy , a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.
Go to Profile#505
Jan Błoński
#22098
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Jan Błoński was a Polish historian, literary critic, publicist and translator. He was a leading representative of the Kraków school of literary criticism, which wielded significant influence in postwar Poland.
Go to Profile#506
Mike Resnick
#5344
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Michael Diamond Resnick was an American science fiction writer and editor. He won five Hugo awards and a Nebula award, and was the guest of honor at Chicon 7. He was the executive editor of the defunct magazine Jim Baen's Universe, and the creator and editor of Galaxy's Edge magazine.
Go to Profile#507
Virgilio S. Almario
#9228
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Virgilio Senadren Almario , better known by his pen name Rio Alma, is a Filipino author, poet, critic, translator, editor, teacher, and cultural manager. He is a National Artist of the Philippines. He formerly served as the chairman of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino , the government agency mandated to promote and standardize the use of the Filipino language. On January 5, 2017, Almario was also elected as the chairman of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts .
Go to Profile#508
Pierre Joris
#9962
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones and The Collected Earlier Poetry . In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia Deserta . Other recent bo...
Go to Profile#509
Yang Jiang
#9045
Overall Influence
1911 - 2016 (105 years)
Yang Jiang was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
Go to Profile#510
Ha Jin
#5560
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin . Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement. Early life Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China. His father was a military officer; at thirteen, Jin joined the People's Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. Jin began to educate himself in Chinese literature and high school curriculum at sixteen. He left the army when he was nineteen, as he entered Heilongjiang University and earned a bachelor's degree in English studies. This was followed by a master's degre...
Go to Profile#511
Bohumil Hrabal
#9082
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Bohumil Hrabal was a Czech writer, often named among the best Czech writers of the 20th century. Early life Hrabal was born in Židenice on 28 March 1914, in what was then the province of Moravia within Austria-Hungary, to an unmarried mother, Marie Božena Kiliánová . According to the organisers of a 2009 Hrabal exhibition in Brno, his biological father was probably Bohumil Blecha , a teacher's son a year older than Marie, who was her friend from the neighbourhood. Marie's parents opposed the idea of their daughter marrying Blecha, as he was about to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army. World ...
Go to Profile#512
Jeff VanderMeer
#10807
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Jeff VanderMeer is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. He has also edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.
Go to Profile#513
David Der-wei Wang
#13631
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David Der-wei Wang is a literary historian, critic, and the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on post-late Qing Chinese fiction, comparative literary theory, colonial and modern Taiwanese literature, diasporic literature, Chinese Malay literature, Sinophone literature, and Chinese intellectuals and artists in the 20th century. His notions such as "repressed modernities", "post-loyalism", and "modern lyrical tradition" are instrumental and widely discussed in the field of Chinese literary studies.
Go to Profile#514
Kamau Brathwaite
#9001
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB , was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.
Go to Profile#515
D. J. Enright
#9415
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Dennis Joseph Enright OBE FRSL was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. He authored Academic Year , Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor and a wide range of essays, reviews, anthologies, children's books and poems.
Go to Profile#516
Arthur Sze
#12077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Peter Carey
#5599
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Peter Philip Carey AO is an Australian novelist. He is one of only five writers to have won the Booker Prize twice—the others being J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood. Carey won his first Booker Prize in 1988, for Oscar and Lucinda, and won his second Booker Prize in 2001, for True History of the Kelly Gang. In May 2008, he was nominated for the Best of the Booker Prize.
Go to Profile#518
William Trevor
#9520
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
William Trevor Cox , known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
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Jessica Mitford
#4496
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Jessica Lucy "Decca" Treuhaft was an English author, one of the six aristocratic Mitford sisters noted for their sharply conflicting politics. Jessica married her second cousin Esmond Romilly, who was killed in World War II, and then American civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, with whom she joined the Communist Party USA and worked closely in the Civil Rights Congress. Both refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. They resigned from the party in 1958.
Go to Profile#520
Fausto Cercignani
#6143
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Fausto Cercignani is an Italian scholar, essayist and poet. Biography Born to Tuscan parents, Fausto Cercignani studied in Milan, where he graduated in foreign languages and literatures with a dissertation dealing with English at Shakespeare’s time. His career as a university professor was at first characterized by philological investigations in the fields of English studies and Germanic studies. In 1983, after teaching at the Universities of Bergamo , Parma , and Pisa , he returned to Milan and carried on his activity at the University of Milan, where he intensified his researches on German ...
Go to Profile#521
Andrew Nelson Lytle
#12286
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Andrew Nelson Lytle was an American novelist, dramatist, essayist and professor of literature. Early life Andrew Nelson Lytle was born on December 26, 1902, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925.
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Mark Lawson
#3648
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Mark Gerard Lawson is an English journalist, broadcaster and author. Specialising in culture and the arts, he is best known for presenting the flagship BBC Radio 4 arts programme Front Row between 1998 and 2014. He is also a Guardian columnist, and presented Mark Lawson Talks To... on BBC Four from 2006 to 2015.
Go to Profile#523
O. N. V. Kurup
#7133
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Ottaplakkal Neelakandan Velu Kurup was a Malayalam poet and lyricist from Kerala, India, who won the Jnanpith Award, the highest literary award in India for the year 2007. He received the awards Padma Shri in 1998 and Padma Vibhushan in 2011, the fourth and second highest civilian honours from the Government of India. In 2007 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University of Kerala, Trivandrum. O. N. V. was known for his leftist leaning. He was a leader of All India Students Federation . He died on 13 February 2016 at KIMS hospital in Thiruvananthapuram due to age-related illnesses, ag...
Go to Profile#524
Gerald Graff
#6632
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Gerald Graff is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963. He has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of California at Irvine and at Berkeley, as well as Ohio State University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000.
Go to Profile#525
Sunil Gangopadhyay
#9057
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Sunil Gangopadhyay or Sunil Ganguly was an Indian poet, historian and novelist in the Bengali language based in the city of Kolkata. He is a former Sheriff of Calcutta. Gangopadhyay obtained his master's degree in Bengali from the University of Calcutta. In 1953 he and a few of his friends started a Bengali poetry magazine, Krittibas. Later he wrote for many different publications.
Go to Profile#526
C. T. Hsia
#13063
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Hsia Chih-tsing 夏志清 or C. T. Hsia was a Chinese historian and literary theorist. He contributed to the introduction of modern Chinese literature to the Western world by promoting the works of once marginalized writers in the 1960s. Today, C. T. Hsia is considered one of the most important critics of Chinese literature.
Go to Profile#527
David Mitchell
#7443
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter. He has written nine novels, two of which, number9dream and Cloud Atlas , were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written articles for several newspapers, most notably for The Guardian, and translated books about autism from Japanese to English.
Go to Profile#528
Christopher Golden
#8694
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Christopher Golden is an American author of horror, fantasy, and suspense novels for adults and teens. Early life Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University.
Go to Profile#529
Jonathan Bate
#4777
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL , is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019.
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Grace Paley
#8160
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Grace Paley, Goodside was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist. Paley wrote three critically acclaimed collections of short stories, which were compiled in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Collected Stories in 1994. Her stories home in on the everyday conflicts and heartbreaks of city life, heavily informed by her childhood in the Bronx.
Go to Profile#531
Michel Houellebecq
#3810
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michel Houellebecq is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.
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Vairamuthu
#4721
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Vairamuthu Ramasamy is an Indian lyricist, poet, and novelist working in the Tamil film industry. He is a prominent figure in the Tamil literary world. A master's graduate from the Pachaiyappa's College in Chennai, he first worked as a translator, while also being a published poet. He entered the Tamil film industry in the year 1980, with the film Nizhalgal, an Ilaiyaraaja musical, directed by Bharathiraja. During the course of his 40-year film career, he has written over 7,500 songs and poems which have won him seven National Awards, the most for any Indian lyricist. He has also been honored...
Go to Profile#533
John Hawkes
#10861
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr. was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction. Biography Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Hawkes was educated at Harvard College, where fellow students included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig that first won him acclaim. Thomas Pynchon is said to have admired the novel. His second novel, The Beetle Leg , an intensely surrealistic Western set in a Montana landscape...
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Sylvia Wynter
#7214
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
Go to Profile#535
Alasdair Gray
#9418
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark , is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.
Go to Profile#536
Maureen Freely
#7586
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maureen Deidre Freely FRSL is an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme since 1996. Biography Born in Neptune, New Jersey, she is the daughter of author John Freely, and has a brother, Brendan. Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.
Go to Profile#537
Rick Moody
#7467
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hiram Frederick Moody III is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.
Go to Profile#538
Farah Mendlesohn
#9357
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Farah Jane Mendlesohn is a British academic historian, writer on speculative fiction, and active member of science fiction fandom. Mendlesohn is best-known for their 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy, which classifies fantasy literature into four modes based on how the fantastic enters the story. Their work as editor includes the Cambridge Companions to science fiction and fantasy, collaborations with Edward James. The science fiction volume won a Hugo Award. Mendlesohn is also known for books on the history of fantasy, including Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, co-written with Michael Levy.
Go to Profile#539
Alanna Nash
#5956
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alanna Kay Nash is an American journalist and biographer. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Nash holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of several acclaimed books. She is a 1972 graduate of Stephens College. A feature writer for The New York Times, Stereo Review, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Weekend, she was named the Society of Professional Journalists' National Member of the Year in 1994. In 1977, Nash's job afforded her the opportunity to become one of the journalists to view the remains of Elvis Presley. In her dust jacket biograp...
Go to Profile#540
Walter Kirn
#9028
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Walter Norris Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into a film of the same name starring George Clooney.
Go to Profile#541
Earl Lovelace
#9420
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile.
Go to Profile#542
Jane Gallop
#3934
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.
Go to Profile#543
W. G. Sebald
#7728
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
Winfried Georg Sebald , 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 literary critics as one of the greatest living authors.
Go to Profile#544
Eduard Limonov
#1976
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Eduard Veniaminovich Limonov was a Russian writer, poet, publicist, political dissident and politician. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1991, where he founded the National Bolshevik Party. The party was banned in the country in 2007 and superseded by The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov. In the 2000s, he was one of the leaders of The Other Russia coalition of opposition forces.
Go to Profile#545
Irving Kristol
#964
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the century".
Go to Profile#546
James Dickey
#5350
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. Dickey is best known for his novel Deliverance , which was adapted into the acclaimed 1972 film of the same name.
Go to Profile#547
Eavan Boland
#8138
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#548
Philip Hobsbaum
#10692
Overall Influence
1932 - 2005 (73 years)
Philip Dennis Hobsbaum was a British teacher, poet and critic. Life Hobsbaum was born into a Polish Jewish family in London, and brought up in Bradford, Yorkshire, where he attended Belle Vue Boys' Grammar School. He read English at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught and heavily influenced by F. R. Leavis. At Cambridge he took over the editing of the magazine delta from Peter Redgrove. After Cambridge, he worked as a school teacher in London from 1955 to 1959, when he moved to Sheffield to study for a PhD under William Empson. In 1962, he took up an academic position at Queen's University, Belfast, and moved again in 1966, to take up a post in the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#549
Margo Glantz
#11882
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Margo Glantz Shapiro is a Mexican writer, essayist, critic and academic. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. She is a recipient of the FIL Award. Biography Margo Glantz's family immigrated to Mexico from Ukraine in the 1920s. Her father, Jacobo Glantz, met her mother, Elizabeth Shapiro in Odessa, where they married. They tried to emigrate to the United States of America, where they had relatives, but were denied entry and had to remain in Mexico. Although they stayed faithful to Jewish traditions, they soon moved in Mexican artistic circles. Her father was...
Go to Profile#550
Kjell Espmark
#14453
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Kjell Erik Espmark was a Swedish writer, literary historian, member of the Swedish Academy, and Professor of the History of Literature at Stockholm University. He was elected to the Swedish Academy on 5 March 1981 and admitted on 20 December 1981. Kjell Espmark succeeded the linguist Elias Wessén to Seat No.16. He was chair of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee between 1987 and 2004.
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