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,
#2851
Philip Vellacott
#56608
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Philip Humphrey Vellacott was an English classical scholar, known for his numerous translations of Greek tragedy. He was born at Grays, Essex and educated at St Paul's School, London and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a double first in the Classics Tripos.
Go to Profile#2852
Abdul-Nabi Isstaif
#61050
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Abdul-Nabi Isstaif is a professor of comparative literature, critical theory and translation at Damascus University. Abdul-Nabi Isstaif was educated at the University of Damascus and St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, where he received his D.Phil. in comparative criticism in 1983. He is a specialist in modern Arabic literature and criticism with special reference to Western influences. Isstaif has taught at the University of Oxford , Sanaa University , King Saud University , New College of the University of South Florida and Roger Williams University , University of Jaumi I , Deakin ...
Go to Profile#2853
Luan Starova
#51518
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Luan Arif Starova was an Albanian writer who lived in North Macedonia. He published his works both in Albanian and in Macedonian. He is translated in over 20 languages around the world. Biography Luan Starova was born in Pogradec, an Albaniann town on Lake Ohrid, in 1941. His family had legal and scholarly background: his grandfather on the father's side had served as an Ottoman qadi in Prilep, before retiring and emigrating to Turkey; his father earned a law degree in Istanbul, and was a lawyer and a scholar.
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Anthony Nuttall
#70269
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Anthony David Nuttall was an English literary critic and academic. Nuttall was educated at Hereford Cathedral School, Watford Grammar School for Boys and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied both Classical Moderations and English Literature. As a postgraduate he wrote a B.Litt thesis on Shakespeare's The Tempest subsequently published as Two Concepts of Allegory , and considered by some to be his most original book. Nuttall first taught at Sussex University where he was successively lecturer, reader and professor of English and where his students included the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the critic and biographer Robert Fraser.
Go to Profile#2855
Nicholas Jose
#68110
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Nicholas Jose is an Australian novelist. Biography Born Robert Nicholas Jose in London, England, to Australian parents, Nicholas Jose grew up mostly in Adelaide, South Australia. He was educated at the Australian National University and Oxford University. He has traveled extensively, particularly in China, where he worked from 1986 to 1990. He was President of Sydney PEN from 2002 to 2005, Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University from 2009 to 2010, and is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing both at the University of Adelaide and Bath Spa University, England. ...
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Lourdes Oñederra
#71365
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Miren Lourdes Oñederra Olaizola is a Basque writer and professor. Life Oñederra was born in San Sebastián in 1958. She studied for her first degree in Spain at the University of Deusto. After graduating in 1980 she took her masters at the University of Iowa. She returned to the Basque country to take her doctorate in philology supervised by Koldo Mitxelena. She was appointed a professor in her home town in 1982.
Go to Profile#2857
Yakov Lyubarsky
#89252
Overall Influence
1929 - 2003 (74 years)
Yakov Nikolayevich Lyubarsky was a Soviet scholar, Doctor of Philology, specialist in Byzantine studies. Biography Yakov Lyubarskiy was born in Kiev, but after his birth, the family moved to Leningrad. His father, Nikolai Yakovlevich Lyubarskiy, was a composer and conductor, who worked as a music director for 30 years at the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theater; his mother was a music teacher.
Go to Profile#2858
Mogens Herman Hansen
#18812
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Mogens Herman Hansen FBA is a Danish classical philologist and classical demographer who is one of the leading scholars in Athenian Democracy and the Polis. Academic career Hansen finished his masters at University of Copenhagen in 1967. The following year he was engaged to work at the same university. He has written many books about the Athenian Democracy. From 1993 to 2005 he was the director of the Copenhagen Polis Centre.
Go to Profile#2859
Ion Negoițescu
#43187
Overall Influence
1921 - 1993 (72 years)
Ion Negoiţescu was a Romanian literary historian, critic, poet, novelist and memoirist, one of the leading members of the Sibiu Literary Circle. A rebellious and eccentric figure, Negoiţescu began his career while still an adolescent, and made himself known as a literary ideologue of the 1940s generation. Moving from a youthful affiliation to the fascist Iron Guard, which he later came to regret, the author became a disciple of modernist doyen Eugen Lovinescu, and, by 1943, rallied the entire Sibiu Circle to the cause of anti-fascism. He was also one of the few openly homosexual intellectuals...
Go to Profile#2860
Michel Grosclaude
#28856
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Michel Grosclaude was a French linguist, and an author of works on grammar, lexicography and Occitan onomastics. Biography Born on 8 July 1926 in Nancy. He was the son of Pierre Grosclaude, an academic. He studied in Lyon and in Marseille and spent time in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during the war, which had some significance for his humanistic ideas. He finished his training in Latin, Greek, and philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#2861
Isidora Aguirre
#58492
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Isidora Aguirre Tupper was a Chilean writer, an author mainly of dramatic works on social issues that have been performed in many countries in the Americas and Europe. Her best known work is , which, constituted "one of the milestones in the history of Chilean theater in the second half of the 20th century."
Go to Profile#2862
Cyrus Grace Dunham
#69082
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Cyrus Dunham is an American writer, actor, and activist. Dunham is a published author, whose debut book, A Year Without A Name: A Memoir, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Early life Dunham was born and raised in New York City. Their parents are artist and photographer Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham. Dunham's older sister, Lena, is a writer, actress, and producer.
Go to Profile#2863
David Samuels
#28158
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Samuels is an American non-fiction and fiction writer. He is the Editor of County Highway, a magazine in the form of a 19th-century American broadsheet that he founded with Walter Kirn. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine; a longtime contributing editor at Harper's Magazine; a contributor to The Atlantic, N+1, The New Yorker and other magazines; and literary editor of Tablet.
Go to Profile#2864
John Stauffer
#8550
Overall Influence
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
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Tin Moe
#58033
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
U Tin Moe was a Burmese poet. Early life Tin Moe was born in the village of Kanmyè in Taungtha Township, Myingyan, Mandalay Division. He received his early education at a Buddhist monastery, and attended school at the town of Yezagyo. His reputation preceded him when he went on to study at the University of Mandalay at the request of faculty members who had been impressed by an essay he wrote for the matriculation exam. He was already a published poet under the pen name Kan Myè Nan Myint Nwe in the Ludu Journal of Mandalay.
Go to Profile#2866
Utpal Kumar Basu
#63278
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Utpal Kumar Basu was a Bengali poet and story teller. Life Born in Bhowanipore area of pre-independence Kolkata , Utpal Kumar Basu spent his school days in Baharampur and Dinhata . A geologist by education, Basu has traveled far and wide over the seas and years. An educationist by profession, Basu is recognized as a trend setter in modern Bengali Poetry. Utpal Kumar Basu was an eminent vernacular poet, educationist and translator. He began writing while studying at Scottish Church College and became a part of the Krittibash group of young Bengali poets. From the very first collection of p...
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Michael Kahn
#22762
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Michael Kahn is an American theater director and drama educator. He was the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. from 1986 until his retirement in 2019. He held the position of Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1992 to 2006.
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Bernard Benstock
#56149
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Bernard Benstock was a literary critic and professor of English at the University of Miami and an authority on British mystery writers and Irish writers Seán O'Casey and James Joyce. Benstock was editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement and a co-founder of the International James Joyce Foundation, where he served as president for eight years. He died on July 14, 1994, at the age of 64, in South Egremont, Massachusetts.
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Wanda Sykes
#45468
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Wanda Yvette Sykes is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. She was first recognized for her work as a writer on The Chris Rock Show, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly named Sykes as one of the 25 funniest people in America. She is also known for her recurring roles on CBS' The New Adventures of Old Christine , and HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm . She received Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series nominations for her roles in ABC's Black-ish , and Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She currently stars in...
Go to Profile#2870
Walter K. Lew
#47576
Overall Influence
Walter K. Lew is a Korean-American poet and scholar. He has taught creative writing, East Asian literatures, and Asian American literature at Brown University, Cornell University, Mills College, the University of Miami, and UCLA. Aside from the award-winning Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts, Lew is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books and several special journal issues and artist's books. Lew's translations and scholarship on Korean literature and Asian American literature have been widely anthologized and he was the first U.S. artist to revive the art of movietelling , begi...
Go to Profile#2871
Helmut Birkhan
#72280
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Helmut Birkhan is an Austrian philologist who is Professor Emeritus of Ancient German Language and Literature and the former Managing Director of the Institute for Germanic Studies at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#2872
Remi Raji
#57038
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Aderemi Raji-Oyelade is a Nigerian poet, writing in English. He is popularly known by his pen name, Remi Raji. Career A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions, among them Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cambridge University, UK, Raji has had scholarly essays published in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. He has read his poems widely in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Wr...
Go to Profile#2873
Nandini Pandey
#66952
Overall Influence
Nandini Pandey is Associate Professor of Classics at the Johns Hopkins University, after teaching from 2014-2021 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an expert on the literature, culture, history, and reception of early imperial Rome.
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Paul L. Jay
#88877
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Paul L. Jay is a professor at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches in the English Department. His research specialties include literary criticism, literary theory, modernism, modernity, American literature, comparative literature, border studies, and globalization.
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Kathryn Hume
#76395
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kathryn Hume is an academic writer on medieval literature , on fantasy, and on contemporary fiction. Hume is Edwin Erle Sparks Emerita Professor of English, Penn State University. She won the IAFA Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1988.
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John Engels
#49354
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
John Engels was an American poet. Life In 1952, John Engels graduated from University of Notre Dame in English. After Navy service, he studied Anglo-Irish literature at the University College, Dublin, then graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with an M.F.A. in 1957. Engels taught at St. Norbert College, Saint Michael's College, Sweet Briar College, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Middlebury College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. In 1995, he was Wyndham Robertson Chair in Creative Writing at Hollins College.
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Bland Simpson
#62561
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bland Simpson is an American author, professor, and musician from North Carolina. Early life Simpson grew up in the northeastern area of North Carolina in Elizabeth City and spent much of his time around the Albemarle Sound. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the middle of his undergraduate career, Simpson left the university to spend time songwriting in New York, particularly for musical theater. He later returned to UNC-Chapel Hill to finish his degree, and graduated in 1973 with a major in political science.
Go to Profile#2878
Ignacio Solares
#87282
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ignacio Solares Bernal was a Mexican novelist, editor and playwright, whose novel La invasión was a bestseller in Mexico and Spain. Until 2005 he served as the Coordinator of Cultural Activities for Literature and Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico ; he was a faculty member there and directed the cultural magazine Revista de la Universidad de México. He formerly served as director of the Department of Theater and Dance and the Division of Literature at UNAM. He also edited the cultural supplement to the weekly magazine Siempre!.
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Marie Ponsot
#55526
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Marie Ponsot was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. Her awards and honors included the National Book Critics Circle Award, Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
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Charles Evered
#50866
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Charles Evered is an American-born playwright, screenwriter and film director. Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Evered grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, the fifth child of Marie and Charles J. Evered.
Go to Profile#2881
Willy Russell
#40740
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William "Willy" Russell is an English dramatist, lyricist and composer. His best known works are Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, Blood Brothers and Our Day Out. Early life Russell was born in Whiston, Lancashire . On leaving school, aged 15, he became a women's hairdresser, eventually running his own salon, until the age of 20 when he decided to go back to college. This led to him qualifying as a teacher. During these years, Russell also worked as a semi-professional singer, writing and performing his own songs in folk clubs.
Go to Profile#2882
Meera Syal
#54579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Meera Syal FRSL is an English comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and by portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No. 42. She became one of the UK's best-known Asian personalities.
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Dolores Castro
#84474
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
Dolores Castro Varela was a Mexican poet, narrator, essayist and literary critic. Biography Castro was a professor of literature at institutions such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Universidad Iberoamericana and Escuela de Periodismo Carlos Septién García. She was the founder of Radio UNAM and producer of radio programs. She also hosted the program Poetas de México on Canal 11 with Alejandro Avilés. She collaborated in the direction of Cultural Diffusion of the University. She served as editor-in-chief and contributor to Barcos de Papel. She was a member of the editorial board of Summa Bibliographical.
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Rosie Scott
#65594
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Rosie Scott was a novelist, poet, playwright, short-story writer, non-fiction writer, editor and lecturer, with dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship. Early life and career Rosie Scott was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father, Dick Scott, is a notable historian and journalist. She completed a BA and Graduate Diploma of Drama at Auckland University, and an MA in English at Victoria University of Wellington. Scott worked in a variety of careers, including as a social worker and in publishing, before becoming a full-time writer.
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Stephen Henderson
#91574
Overall Influence
1925 - 1997 (72 years)
Stephen E. Henderson was an American professor of African-American literature and culture, whose 1973 book Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference is regarded as a seminal work. He is noted for providing the first formal interpretation of militant Black poetry, and, with Vincent Harding and William Strickland, for founding the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Philip Baldi
#26688
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Philip Baldi is an American linguist and classical scholar specializing in Indo-European studies. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Classics at Pennsylvania State University. Biography Baldi was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1946. He received his B.A. from the University of Scranton in Classics in 1968, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Rochester in 1971 and 1973, respectively. He was appointed Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Pennsylvania State University in 1981. Baldi specializes in Indo-European studies, on which he is the author of numerous bo...
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Wilton Barnhardt
#78297
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Wilton Barnhardt is a former reporter for Sports Illustrated and is the author of Emma Who Saved My Life , Gospel , Show World , and Lookaway, Lookaway . Barnhardt took his B.A. at Michigan State University, and was a graduate student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, where he read for an M.Phil. in English. He teaches fiction-writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing.
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Adolf Frisé
#47137
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Adolf Frisé was a German journalist, author and editor. He was the editor of the literary works of the Austrian philosophical writer Robert Musil. Life Frisé grew up in Viersen in the Lower Rhine region where he attended the Erasmus von Rotterdam Gymnasium. The German writer and historian of culture Gustav René Hocke was a friend and fellow student there. After completing his secondary education, he went on to study at Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he studied under Friedrich Gundolf and took his doctorate in German Studies in 1932. He then worked as a freelance writer in Berlin...
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Vivian Smith
#69643
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Vivian Brian Smith is an Australian poet. He is considered one of the most lyrical and observant Australian poets of his generation. Early life Smith was born in Hobart, Tasmania and studied French at the University of Tasmania from which he graduated with a Master of Arts. He left Tasmania in the late 1950s and has lived since then in Sydney, where he was a longtime professor at the University of Sydney until his retirement in the early 2000s. He returns to Tasmania every year and his poetry is still influenced by the landscape there. Smith has published criticism as well as a bibliography of the work of Patrick White.
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Brian Johnston
#64124
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Brian Johnston was a British literary researcher, especially renowned for his works on the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen , including his three influential books, The Ibsen Cycle , To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Plays , and Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama .
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Rodger Kamenetz
#40759
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus , an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.
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Jennine Capó Crucet
#32397
Overall Influence
Jennine Capó Crucet is an American novelist, and short story writer. Life Capó Crucet attended Cornell University where she received a B.A. in English and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She also graduated from the University of Minnesota with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska.
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Arielle Greenberg
#71387
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Arielle Greenberg is a feminist poet and the poetry editor of Black Clock. She named and described the concept of the Gurlesque in the anthology Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, which she co-edited with Lara Glenum.
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John Wagner
#45277
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Wagner is an American-born British comics writer. Alongside Pat Mills, he helped revitalise British comics in the 1970s, and continues to be active in the British comics industry, occasionally also working in American comics. He is the co-creator, with artist Carlos Ezquerra, of the character Judge Dredd.
Go to Profile#2895
Abdullah El Tayib
#63461
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Abdullah El Tayib, also referred to as 'Abd Allāh al-Tayyib al-Majdhūb was a prominent Sudanese writer and scholar of Sudanese literature and the Arabic language. He was born in Tamirab, a village near Ad-Dāmar in Sudan, during the Anglo-Egyptian condominium and received his primary education in Kassala, Ad-Damar and Berber. After graduating from Gordon Memorial College , he continued his studies until his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1950.
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Jonathan Green
#22083
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Green is a freelance writer. He has written for various science fiction and fantasy franchises, including Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Games Workshop's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 game universes.
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Hugo Achugar
#54390
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hugo Achugar is a professor emeritus at the University of Miami and a Uruguayan poet, essayist, and researcher. Biography Achugar graduated from the Artigas Institute for Teachers with a degree in literature and taught secondary education in Uruguay until he was dismissed by the Uruguayan dictatorship. He then relocated to Caracas, where he worked as a researcher for the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies.
Go to Profile#2898
Geeta Tripathee
#48991
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Geeta Tripathee is a Nepali poet, lyricist, essayist, literary critic and scholar. An eminent writer in Nepali, Geeta Tripathee has two volumes of poetry collection, one of lyrical poems and seven books in other literary genre to her credit. She also writes for newspapers on issues concerning women, environment and societal injustice.
Go to Profile#2899
Nina Gorlanova
#67710
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Nina Viktorovna Gorlanova is a modern short-story writer and novelist who has been living in a provincial Russian city Perm. Biography Gorlanova was born in 1947, grew up in a village in Perm region, and studied philology at Perm University. She now lives with her husband Vyacheslav Bukur, her co-author and life companion in Perm city, where most of her stories and novels are set. In her works she creates a somewhat fantastic world populated with curious characters and possessing its own mythology. The life in her invented Perm is squalid but merry, risky but indestructible. Her main themes ...
Go to Profile#2900
Friedhelm Hardy
#47666
Overall Influence
1943 - 2004 (61 years)
Friedhelm Ernst Hardy , also known as Fred Hardy, was Professor of Indian Religions, teaching at King's College London. He was a linguist familiar with both classical and modern Indian languages, described in his obituary as "unrivalled in this country and possibly anywhere in the world today". He is the author of two prominent works, The Religious Culture of India: Power, Love and Wisdom and Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India.
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