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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List of the most influential people in Literature,

#1101

Stanisław Bereś

Stanisław Bereś

#21589

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Stanisław Bereś is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and literary historian. He is professor at the University of Wroclaw, both at the Institute of Polish Philology and the Department of Journalism and Social Communication. In 1987-1993 he taught at the University of Charles de Gaulle in Lille, France.

#1102

William Melvin Kelley

William Melvin Kelley

#22256

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

William Melvin Kelley was an African-American novelist and short-story writer. He is perhaps best known for his debut novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962. He was also a university professor and creative writing instructor. In 2008, he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Kelley is credited with being the first to commit the term "woke" to print, in the title of a 1962 New York Times op-ed on the use of African-American slang by beatniks: "If You're Woke, You Dig It".

#1103

Peter Nazareth

#20763

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Peter Nazareth is a Ugandan-born literary critic and writer of fiction and drama. Life Peter Nazareth was born in Uganda of Indian Goan ancestry, and his mother's family was earlier based in Malaya-Malaysia-Singapore. He was educated at Makerere University , where he received his BA in English Literature in 1962, and at the universities of London and Leeds in England.

#1104

Vira Vovk

#22221

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Vira Ostapivna Selianska Biography Born in Boryslav in 1926, she grew up in the Hutsul region in the town of Kuty . Vira Vovk's secondary education was completed in Lviv and Dresden. She studied Germanicss, music history and comparative literature at the University of Tübingen. In 1945, she emigrated with her mother to Portugal and in 1949, further to Brazil. She went to Rio de Janeiro where she completed her university studies. Post graduate studies were completed at Columbia University and Munich University.

#1105

Ismayil Shykhly

#42135

Overall Influence

1919 - 1995 (76 years)

Ismayil Shykhly , also known by his birth name Ismayil Shikhlinsky Gahraman oglu , was an Azerbaijani writer. Early years Shykhly was born on March 22, 1919, in Ikinji Shykhly village of Qazakh Rayon of Azerbaijan. He studied in Kosalar village. In 1934, he enrolled in Qakhazh Pedagogical School. He was impressed by Samad Vurgun's poem "Yadıma düşdü" during his speech at Alexandr Pushkin's 100th anniversary celebrated in Qazakh.

#1106

Doug Dorst

#24928

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Doug Dorst is an American novelist, short story writer, and creative writing instructor. Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos.

#1107

Burton Raffel

#14775

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Burton Nathan Raffel was an American writer, translator, poet and professor. He is best known for his vigorous translation of Beowulf, still widely used in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Prose from the Old English, The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Essential Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Dante's The Divine Comedy.

#1108

Forrest Gander

#20749

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#1109

Ayi Kwei Armah

#17224

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Ayi Kwei Armah is a Ghanaian writer best known for his novels including The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born , Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers . He is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.

#1110

Jean-Pierre Richard

#14529

Overall Influence

1922 - 2019 (97 years)

Jean-Pierre Richard was a French writer and literary critic. Biography Jean-Pierre Richard began his advanced studies at the École normale supérieure, at the time a school of the University of Paris, in 1941, passed the "agrégation" in literature in 1945, and got his doctoral degree in 1962 at the University of Paris. He taught literature first in foreign universities, and then in France, and finally became a professor at the University of Paris IV in 1978.

#1111

Herbert W. Franke

Herbert W. Franke

#3642

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Herbert W. Franke was an Austrian scientist and writer. Die Zeit calls him "the most prominent German writing Science Fiction author". He is also one of the important early computer artists , creating computer graphics and early digital art since the late 1950s. Franke was also active in the fields of future research as well as speleology. He used his pen name Sergius Both as this Avatar name in Active Worlds and Opensimulator grids. The Sergius Both Award is given for creative scripting in Immersionskunst by Stiftung Kunstinformatik, first time issued at Amerika Art 2022.

#1112

Craig Arnold

#27913

Overall Influence

1967 - 2009 (42 years)

Craig Arnold was an American poet and professor. His first book of poems, Shells , was selected by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His many honors include the 2005 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature, The Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, an Alfred Hodder Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a MacDowell Fellowship.

#1113

Paul Fry

#25162

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Paul Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English at Yale University, a specialist in British Romantic poetry. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

#1114

T. C. Boyle

#16254

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.

#1115

Danton Remoto

#24327

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Danton Relato Remoto is a Filipino writer, essayist, reporter, editor, columnist, and professor. Remoto received the first prize at the ASEAN Letter-Writing Contest for Young People. The award earned Remoto a scholarship at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. As a professor, Remoto taught English and Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University. Remoto is the chairman emeritus of Ang Ladlad, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender political party in the Philippines.

#1116

Dan Miron

#32439

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Dan Miron is an Israeli-born American literary critic and author. An expert on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Miron is a Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the Leonard Kaye Professor of Hebrew and Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.

#1117

Alonso Cueto

#26173

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Alonso Cueto Caballero is a Peruvian author, university professor and newspaper columnist. His writing career has spanned nearly four decades, during which he has produced dozens of works of fiction, articles and essays. He has won numerous accolades for his work, and several of his novels have been adapted for film.

#1118

Judy Malloy

#19305

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

#1119

Tao Lin

#16214

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (41 years)

Tao Lin is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. He has published four novels, a novella, two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, as well as an extensive assortment of online content. His third novel, Taipei, was published by Vintage on June 4, 2013. His nonfiction book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change was published by Vintage on May 1, 2018. His fourth novel, Leave Society, was published by Vintage on August 3, 2021.

#1120

Melissa Febos

#21829

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (44 years)

Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart , and the essay collections, Abandon Me and Girlhood . Early life and education Febos grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a sea captain, and her mother a therapist. She left home at 16 after passing the GED, moved to Boston, and worked at an assortment of jobs including as a boatyard hand and as a chambermaid. She attended night courses at Harvard Extension School, then enrolled in The New School and moved to New York City in August 1999. She later earned an MF...

#1121

Michael Gorra

#20387

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Michael Gorra is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985.

#1122

Alurista

#17947

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia , better known by his nom de plume Alurista, is an American poet and activist. His work was influential in the Chicano Movement and is important to the field of Chicano poetry.

#1123

Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath

#23480

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Patrick McGrath is a British novelist, whose work has been categorised as gothic fiction. Early life McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital from the age of five where his father was Medical Superintendent. He was educated at a Jesuit boarding school in Windsor from the age of thirteen, before moving to another Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, upon the closure of his first school. In 1967, at the age of sixteen, he ran away from this institution to London. He graduated from the Birmingham College of Commerce with an honours degree in English and A...

#1124

Kiran Desai

#18906

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

Kiran Desai is an Indiann author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.

#1125

Michael Dorris

#25781

Overall Influence

1945 - 1997 (52 years)

Michael Anthony Dorris was an American novelist and scholar who was the first Chair of the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth College. His works include the novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and the memoir The Broken Cord .

#1126

Hellmuth Karasek

Hellmuth Karasek

#17667

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

Hellmuth Karasek was a German journalist, literary critic, novelist, and the author of many books on literature and film. He was one of Germany's best-known feuilletonists. Biography Karasek was born in the capital city of Moravia, Brno , which was then a part of Czechoslovakia . Karasek attended the National Political Institutes of Education in Loben. In 1944, when he was ten, his family fled from Bielitz in the neighbouring German region of Silesia to Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt. After finishing his schooling in the early 1950s he moved from there—then part of East Germany—to West Germany an...

#1127

Jack Rosenthal

#12281

Overall Influence

1931 - 2004 (73 years)

Jack Morris Rosenthal was an English playwright. He wrote 129 early episodes of the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and over 150 screenplays, including original TV plays, feature films, and adaptations.

#1128

Kiyoko Murata

#31236

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kiyoko Murata is a Japanese writer. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes. The Government of Japan has awarded her the Medal with Purple Ribbon and Order of the Rising Sun, and she has been appointed to the Japan Art Academy. Her work has been adapted for film by Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Onchi.

#1129

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith

#15592

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He is also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published 32 books including ten books of poetry, notably Fidget , Soliloquy , Day and his American trilogy, The Weather , Traffic , and Sports , 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters , and 'Capital: New York Capital of the Twentieth Century .

#1130

Amy Gerstler

#26505

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Amy Gerstler is an American poet. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. Biography Amy Gerstler was born in 1956. She is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is now a professor in the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine. Previously, she taught in the Bennington Writing Seminars program, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.

#1131

Rumer Godden

#15861

Overall Influence

1907 - 1998 (91 years)

Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951. A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.

#1132

Tomaž Šalamun

#18086

Overall Influence

1941 - 2014 (73 years)

Tomaž Šalamun was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe and an internationally acclaimed absurdist. His books of Slovene poetry have been translated into twenty-one languages, with nine of his thirty-nine books of poetry published in English. His work has been called a poetic bridge between old European roots and America. Šalamun was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was married to the painter Metka Krašovec.

#1133

Sharon Creech

#28078

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Sharon Creech is an American writer of children's novels. She was the first American winner of the Carnegie Medal for British children's books and the first person to win both the American Newbery Medal and the British Carnegie.

#1134

M. M. Kalburgi

#10698

Overall Influence

1938 - 2015 (77 years)

Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi was an Indian scholar of Vachana sahitya in the Kannada-language and academic who served as the vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi. A noted epigraphist of Kannada, he was awarded the National Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006 for Marga 4, a collection of his research articles.

#1135

Larry David

#13397

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Lawrence Gene David is an American comedian, writer, actor, and television producer. He and Jerry Seinfeld created the television sitcom Seinfeld, on which David was head writer and executive producer for the first seven seasons. He gained further recognition for the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm, which he created and stars in as a fictionalized version of himself. He has written or co-written the story of every episode since its pilot episode in 1999.

#1136

Barry Unsworth

#30101

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Barry Unsworth FRSL was an English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.

#1137

David Grene

#14043

Overall Influence

1913 - 2002 (89 years)

David Grene was an Irish American professor of classics at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death. He was a co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought and is best known for his translations of ancient Greek literature.

#1138

Bronisław Maj

#50014

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Bronisław Maj is a Polish poet, essayist, translator and academic. Biography Maj attended Jan Kasprowicz High School in Łódź. He later graduated in Polish philology from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and there he obtained his Ph.D. in the humanities.

#1139

Kiese Laymon

#19216

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He is the author of three full-length books: a novel, Long Division , and two memoirs, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the award-winning Heavy: An American Memoir . Laymon was awarded a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program in 2022.

#1140

Stephen Orgel

#27323

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Stephen Orgel is Professor of English at Stanford University. Best known as a scholar of Shakespeare, Orgel writes primarily about the political and historical context of Renaissance literature. Orgel received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1954 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1959. He has taught at Stanford since 1985. He is a noted book collector.

#1141

John Montague

#20852

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

John Montague was an Irish poet. Born in America, he was raised in Ireland. He published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir. He was one of the best known Irish contemporary poets. In 1998 he became the first occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry . In 2010, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, France's highest civil award.

#1142

Purushottama Lal

Purushottama Lal

#15495

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Purushottama Lal , commonly known as P. Lal, was an Indian poet, essayist, translator, professor and publisher. He was the founder of publishing firm Writers Workshop in Calcutta, established in 1958.

#1143

Patricia Smith

#18353

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.

#1144

William Kittredge

#27448

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

William Kittredge was an American writer from Oregon, United States, who lived mostly in Missoula, Montana. Biography He was born in 1932 in Portland, Oregon, and grew up on a ranch in Southeastern Oregon's Warner Valley in Lake County, where he attended school in Adel, Oregon. He later attended high school in California and Oregon. He earned his undergraduate degree in agriculture from Oregon State University. At age 35, he retired from ranching and enrolled at the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, where he completed his M.F.A.

#1145

Peter Edgerly Firchow

#26815

Overall Influence

1937 - 2008 (71 years)

Peter Edgerly Firchow was an American literary scholar and educator. He wrote extensively on the relationship between British and German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he was a leading scholar of the British writer Aldous Huxley. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota English Department from 1967 to 2008 and as director of the university's Comparative Literature program from 1972 to 1978.

#1146

Anna Ogino

#29709

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Anna Ogino is a Japanese author and emeritus professor of literature at Keio University. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Itō Sei Literature Prize. Early years Ogino was born as Anna Gaillard in Naka-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, to a Japanese mother and a French-American father. Her mother, Kinuko Emi, was a prominent abstract painter. Ogino was naturalized during elementary school, and received her undergraduate and master's degree in French literature from Keio University, as well as receiving a scholarship to Paris-Sorbonne University to study Rabelais. In 2...

#1147

Gillian Beer

#21534

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (89 years)

Dame Gillian Patricia Kempster Beer, is a British literary critic and academic. She was President of Clare Hall from 1994 to 2001, and King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2002.

#1148

Adam Roberts

#21796

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Adam Charles Roberts is a British science fiction and fantasy novelist. In 2018 he was elected vice-president of the H.G. Wells Society. Career Roberts has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

#1149

Douglas E. Winter

#23099

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Douglas E. Winter is an American writer, critic and lawyer. Winter grew up in Granite City, Illinois. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1975 and became a lawyer in Washington, DC, currently working as Of Counsel/Director of Analytics Review Technology at internationally based law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP, concentrating on complex litigation, information management, electronic discovery, and entertainment law. Winter has also taught legal writing at the University of Iowa.

#1150

John F. Callahan

#36966

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John F. Callahan is the literary executor for Ralph Ellison, and was the editor for his posthumously-released novel Juneteenth. In addition to his work with Ellison, Callahan has written or edited numerous volumes related to African-American literature, with a particular emphasis on 20th century literature. Some of Callahan's other works include In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in 20th Century Black Fiction, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook, and The Illusions of a Nation: Myth and History in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Callahan also edited Ellison's short st...

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