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,
#2751
Alberto de Lacerda
#55339
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Carlos Alberto Portugal Correia de Lacerda was a Portuguese poet and BBC Radio Presenter. Biography Alberto de Lacerda was born in Mozambique in 1928. In 1946, Lacerda moved to Lisbon. In 1951, he began work at the BBC as a radio presenter and settled in London. He travelled in Brazil, between 1959 and 1960 at the invitation of the Brazilian Modernist Manuel Bandeira. He returned to London and worked as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. He taught European and Comparative literature at the Universities of Austin, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts from where he retired in 1996 as a Professor Emeritus of Poetics.
Go to Profile#2752
Philip Hardie
#77822
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Philip Russell Hardie, FBA is a specialist in Latin literature at the University of Cambridge. He has written especially on Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius, and on the influence of these writers on the literature, art, and ideology of later centuries.
Go to Profile#2753
E. C. Osondu
#66084
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Epaphras Chukwuenweniwe Osondu predominantly known as E. C. Osondu is a Nigerian writer known for his short stories. His story Waiting won the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing, for which he had been a finalist in 2007 with his story Jimmy Carter's Eyes. Osondu had previously won the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction and his story A Letter from Home was judged one of "The Top Ten Stories on the Internet" in 2006.
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Alfred Ebenbauer
#85413
Overall Influence
1945 - 2007 (62 years)
Alfred Ebenbauer was an Austrian philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Alfred Ebenbauer was born in Sankt Michael in Obersteiermark, Austria on 13 October 1945. He was the first of five children of an agrarian. He completed his matura with distinction at Judenburg, and subsequently studied German literature and German history at the University of Vienna. He graduated Sub auspiciis Praesidentis in 1970 with a thesis on Old Norse literature.
Go to Profile#2755
Lucius Shepard
#44401
Overall Influence
1947 - 2014 (67 years)
Lucius Shepard was an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leaned into other genres, such as magical realism. Career Shepard was a native of Lynchburg, Virginia where he was born in 1943. His first short stories appeared in 1983, and his first novel, Green Eyes, appeared in 1984. At the time, he was considered part of the cyberpunk movement. Shepard came to writing late, having first enjoyed a varied career, including a stint playing rock and roll in the Midwest and extensive travel throughout Europe and Asia. Algis Budrys, reviewing Green Eyes, praise...
Go to Profile#2756
Harvey Fierstein
#33390
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Harvey Forbes Fierstein is an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter, known for his distinctive gravelly voice. He is best known for his theater work in Torch Song Trilogy and Hairspray and film roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, and as the voice of Yao in Mulan and Mulan II. Fierstein won two Tony Awards, Best Actor in a Play and Best Play, for Torch Song Trilogy. He received his third Tony Award, Best Book of a Musical, for the musical La Cage aux Folles and his fourth, the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for playing Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, a role he revived in its...
Go to Profile#2757
Susanna Braund
#82734
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Susanna H. Morton Braund is a professor of Latin poetry and its reception at the University of British Columbia. Education Braund received her BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge in 1978, followed by a PhD in 1984 from the same institution.
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Leo Damrosch
#57168
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Leopold Damrosch Jr. is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Puritanism.
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Bernd Engler
#43965
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Bernd Engler is a German Anglicist and literary scholar. Since October 2006 he is President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Tübingen, Germany. Early life and education Engler was educated at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the University of Kent, England. He graduated in English and German at the University of Freiburg in 1980. After his doctorate in American literature he started a postdoctoral qualification which he finished in 1989.
Go to Profile#2760
Denis Feeney
#41915
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Denis C. Feeney, FBA is Professor of Classics and Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University. He was born in New Zealand and educated at St Peter's College, Auckland and Auckland Grammar School. He received his B.A. , MA in Latin and MA in Greek from the University of Auckland and a D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1982. He has also been a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and New College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#2761
Namwali Serpell
#60081
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Namwali Serpell is an American and Zambian writer who teaches in the United States. In April 2014, she was named on Hay Festival's Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers aged under 40 with the potential and talent to define trends in African literature. Her short story "The Sack" won the 2015 Caine Prize for African fiction in English. In 2020, Serpell won the Belles-lettres category Grand Prix of Literary Associations 2019 for her debut novel The Old Drift.
Go to Profile#2762
Arthur Terry
#57129
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Arthur Hubert Terry was an English philologist, critic and translator, who was an expert in Catalan literature, and one of the best experts on Joan Maragall. He was Professor of Spanish at Queen's University Belfast and Professor of Literature at the University of Essex .
Go to Profile#2763
David Bottoms
#61487
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Bottoms was an American poet, novelist, and academic. He was Poet Laureate of Georgia from 2000 to 2012. Biography Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems appeared in magazines such as The Southern Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. He was the author of eight other books of poetry, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture-Tree, Armored Hear...
Go to Profile#2764
Helen H. Bacon
#62593
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Helen Hazard Bacon was professor of classics at Barnard College. She was known in particular for her work on Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus. Bacon was also well known for her work on classical themes in the poetry of Robert Frost and in the mythological writing of Edith Hamilton. Bacon was president of the American Philological Association in 1985.
Go to Profile#2765
Feng Zhi
#83339
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Feng Zhi was a Chinese writer and translator. He was also the director and then honorary director of the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences since 1964. Feng published several collections of poems, including Songs of Yesterday and Northern Journey and Other Poems, in his early life. Then he went to Germany and introduced the poetry of Rilke, Goethe, Heine, along with Novalis afterwards, thus he was bestowed Goethe Medal in the 1980s. He was also a scholar of Du Fu.
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Curtis White
#60349
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Curtis White is an American essayist and author. Most of his career has been spent writing experimental fiction, but he has turned recently to writing books of social criticism. Books As author:Heretical Songs Metaphysics in the Midwest The Idea of Home Anarcho-Hindu Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics Memories of My Father Watching TV Requiem The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves America's Magic Mountain The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work The Barbaric Heart: Faith, M...
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Mary Jo Bang
#44723
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet. Life Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor's and Master's in sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London with a Bachelor's in Photography, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing . Previously, she has taught at Columbia College, Yale University, The New School for Social Research, University of Montana, Columbia University and at Iowa's Writing Workshop. Bang is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Chana Bloch
#46388
Overall Influence
1940 - 2017 (77 years)
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. Life and work Born as Florence Ina Faerstein in the Bronx, New York, she was a second-generation American, the daughter of Benjamin and Rose Faerstein; her parents were both observant Jews who had immigrated from Ukraine. Bloch later identified herself as a Jewish humanist. Her father was a dentist, and her mother a homemaker.
Go to Profile#2769
Jean D'Costa
#55505
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jean Constance D'Costa is a Jamaican children's novelist, linguist, and professor emeritus. Her novels have been praised for their use of both Jamaican Creole and Standard English. Early life and education Jean Constance Creary was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica, the youngest of three children to parents who were school teachers. Her father was also a Methodist minister. They moved to the capital, Kingston in 1944, and then to St. James and Trelawny. She attended rural elementary schools, and then St. Hilda's High School in Brown's Town, St. Ann from 1949 to 1954 on a government merit scholarship.
Go to Profile#2770
Ato Quayson
#54971
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ato Quayson is a Ghanaian literary critic and Professor of English at Stanford University where he acts as the current chair of the department. He is also the chair of the newly established Department of African and African American Studies. He was formerly a Professor of English at New York University , and before that was University Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. His writings on African literature, postcolonial studies, disability studies, urban studies and in literary theory have been widely published. He is a ...
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Mo Yan
#60100
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Guan Moye , better known by the pen name Mo Yan , is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".
Go to Profile#2772
Sherman Alexie
#57517
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. is a Native American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington.
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George Ella Lyon
#46016
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
George Ella Lyon is an American author from Kentucky, who has published in many genres, including picture books, poetry, juvenile novels, and articles. Biography George Ella Lyon was born April 25, 1949, in Harlan, Kentucky, a coal mining town in southeastern Kentucky, to Robert Vernon, Jr. and Gladys Hoskins. She married Stephen C. Lyon, a musician, on June 3, 1972, and has since had two children with him.
Go to Profile#2774
Paisley Rekdal
#68174
Overall Influence
Paisley Rekdal is an American poet who is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Utah. She is the author of a book of essays entitled The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In, the memoir Intimate, as well as six books of poetry. For her work, she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both 2009 and 2013, Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and several other awards from the state arts council.
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Avril Pyman
#71617
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Avril Pyman is a British scholar and translator of Russian literature. Avril was a Reader in Russian at Durham University and was the first female scholar of the University to be elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.
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María Negroni
#90421
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
María Negroni is an Argentinian poet, essayist, novelist and translator. She graduated from Columbia University, with a PhD in Latin American Literature. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She was a visiting professor at New York University, in 2008.
Go to Profile#2777
David Gilmour
#48928
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Gilmour is a Canadian fiction novelist, former television journalist, film critic, and former professor at the University of Toronto. Early life Gilmour was born in London, Ontario, and later moved to Toronto for schooling. He is a graduate of Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2778
Arthur Laurents
#39687
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, theatre director, film producer and screenwriter. With a career spanning seven decades he received numerous accolades including two Tony Awards, and a Drama Desk Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#2779
Marco Antonio de la Parra
#66921
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marco Antonio de la Parra is a Chilean psychiatrist, writer, and dramatist. Many of his works, which are strongly influenced by the country's 1973–90 military regime, satirize the national condition through metaphors. He is the author of more than 70 titles translated into several languages, including plays, novels, storybooks, and essays.
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Jacek Leociak
#20966
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jacek Leociak is a Polish literary scholar and historian as well as author. He is a professor of humanities and an employee of the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#2781
Jacqueline Taylor
#37893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jacqueline Taylor was the provost and vice president for academic affairs at The College of New Jersey from 2013-2018. Biography Jacqueline Taylor was born in Kentucky, 1951. After receiving her bachelor's in English and communications arts from Georgetown College and her master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas in Austin, Taylor completed the Management Development program at Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1996.
Go to Profile#2782
Lee K. Abbott
#69615
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Lee Kittredge Abbott was an American writer. He was the author of seven collections of short stories and was a professor emeritus of English at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Life Abbott was born October 17, 1947, in the Panama Canal Zone. His father, a colonel in the Army, at last settled his family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The stark desert landscape would become very important in Abbott's fiction.
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Joe Wenderoth
#58043
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Joe Wenderoth is an American writer, performer, teacher, and film-maker. He has published six books: four books of poetry, an epistolary novel, and a book of essays. Wenderoth curates "The Seizure State", which appears in the Brooklyn-based magazine Gigantic. He also produces About Brett Favre, which is the podcast associated with "The Seizure State".
Go to Profile#2784
Harbhajan Singh
#50290
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Harbhajan Singh was an Indian poet, critic, cultural commentator, and translator in the Punjabi-language. Along with Amrita Pritam, Harbhajan is credited with revolutionising the Punjabi poetry writing style. He published 17 collections of poems, including Registan Vich Lakarhara, 19 works of literary history and translated 14 pieces of literature of others including those of Aristotle, Sophocles, Rabindranath Tagore and selections from the Rig Veda.
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Carlos Rojas Vila
#51656
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Carlos Rojas Vila was a Spanish author, academic, and artist born in Barcelona in 1928. His father was Carlos Rojas Pinilla, a Colombian doctor, who was in turn the younger brother of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the 19th president of Colombia. He attended the University of Barcelona, obtaining his undergraduate degree in 1951. He earned his doctorate in 1955 from the University of Madrid with a study on Richard Ford. In 1960 he began teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he led a distinguished career until his retirement in 1996.
Go to Profile#2786
Kenneth Lonergan
#47154
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kenneth Lonergan is an American film director, playwright, and screenwriter. He is the co-writer of the film Gangs of New York , and wrote and directed You Can Count on Me , Margaret , and Manchester by the Sea . Lonergan is also known for his work as a playwright. His most noted plays include This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero and The Waverly Gallery. Each also had a successful revival engagement on Broadway, which resulted in each play receiving a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
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Dinah Birch
#61457
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dinah Lynne Birch is an English literary critic. She is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact, and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She was a student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and also undertook her doctorate at the University of Oxford. In 1980, she became the first woman to be elected to the Governing Body of Merton College.
Go to Profile#2788
Carole Maso
#55489
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Carole Maso is a contemporary American novelist and essayist, known for her experimental, poetic and fragmentary narratives which are often called postmodern. She is a recipient of a 1993 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.
Go to Profile#2789
Lavonne J. Adams
#80237
Overall Influence
Lavonne J. Adams is a published poet and writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Adams grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, but has lived in North Carolina for over 30 years. Adams taught and was the MFA Coordinator in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
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Stanley Mitchell
#44897
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Stanley Mitchell was a British translator, academic, and author, noted for his English verse translation of Alexander Pushkin's Russian verse novel Eugene Onegin. Life and works Stanley Mitchell was born in London of immigrant Jewish parents in a family in which Yiddish was often spoken. His father was born in Ukraine and, his mother's parents in Belarus. He attended Christ College School in Finchley, North London, which included a period of evacuation to Biggleswade during World War II.
Go to Profile#2791
Ellen Douglas
#58797
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Ellen Douglas was the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton , an American author. Her 1973 novel Apostles of Light was a National Book Award nominee. Biography Douglas was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and grew up in Hope, Arkansas, and Alexandria, Louisiana. She graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1942 and later settled in Greenville, Mississippi with her husband Kenneth Haxton. She had three sons with Haxton: Richard, Ayres, and Brooks Haxton, the latter a notable, award-winning poet and writer.
Go to Profile#2792
Terese Marie Mailhot
#59782
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Terese Marie Mailhot is a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher. Early life and education Mailhot grew up in Seabird Island, British Columbia, on the Seabird Island First Nation reservation. Her mother, Wahzinak, was a healer, social worker, poet, and radical activist, and her father, Ken Mailhot, was an artist. Her father had been incarcerated and was an alcoholic who molested Mailhot when she was young, and was often violent. Mailhot's mother had a letter-writing relationship with Salvador Agron, and shared the correspondence with musician Paul Simon, who used them for his Broadway musical, The Capeman.
Go to Profile#2793
Joanna Scott
#43441
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joanna Scott is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her award-winning fiction is known for its wide-ranging subject matter and its incorporation of historical figures into imagined narratives.
Go to Profile#2794
Scott Spencer
#45985
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Scott Spencer is an American author who has written fourteen novels. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie Father Hood. Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. Endless Love was first adapted into a motion picture by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, and a second adaptation by Shana Feste was released in 2014. Waking the Dead was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon in 2000. The novels Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper have both been nominated for the National Book Award, with Endless Love selling over 2 million copies. S...
Go to Profile#2795
Lee Blessing
#18988
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lee Knowlton Blessing is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City.
Go to Profile#2796
Francisco Rico Manrique
#69009
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Francisco Rico Manrique is a Spanish philologist. He was a student of José Manuel Blecua and Martín de Riquer. He is a professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and, since 1987, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy as well as the Académia das Ciéncias de Lisboa, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the British Academy.
Go to Profile#2797
Anne Norton
#22522
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Anne Norton is an American professor of political science and comparative literature. She is also known for her controversial anti-Semitic views. Early life As a child, Norton lived and traveled throughout the world with her family because her father was an officer in the U.S. Navy.
Go to Profile#2798
Erica Jong
#64291
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Go to Profile#2799
František Listopad
#34775
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
František Listopad was a Czech poet, prose writer, essayist, theatre and television director, promoter of Czech literature and culture abroad, regarded as an expert on Central European thought and cultural output.
Go to Profile#2800
Gaston Bouatchidzé
#48417
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Gaston Bouatchidzé was a Georgian-French writer and translator. Bouatchidzé was born in Tbilisi of a French mother and Georgian father who had lived in France for ten years before moving to the Soviet Union in 1934. Bouatchidzé graduated from the Lviv University, Ukrainian SSR, in 1958 and specialized in the French language and literature. He was a professor of French literature at the Tbilisi State University from 1960 to 1990, and an associate professor of comparative literary studies at the University of Nantes from 1991 to 2001. He has translated several pieces of Georgian literature into French, and vice versa.
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