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,
#4551
Ennis Rees
#89052
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Ennis Samuel Rees, Jr. was an American poet and professor. He was named by Governor Richard Wilson Riley as the third South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1985. Biography Early life and education Rees was born in Newport News, Virginia, on March 17, 1925. His parents were Ennis Samuel, Sr., and Dorothy Drumwright Rees. In high school, he participated in track and lettered in football, focusing more on athletics than academics. He was also student body vice president and his senior class vice president as well.
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Luka Bekavac
#132256
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Luka Bekavac is a Croatian writer, university professor and translator. He was born in the city of Osijek. His novels Drenje and Viljevo have received critical acclaim. Viljevo won the Janko Polić Kamov Award in 2014, and the EU Prize for Literature in 2015. As a translator, Bekavac has translated works by Martin Amis, Jonathan Franzen, Alberto Toscano, Naomi Klein and Aleksandar Hemon among others.
Go to Profile#4553
Charles Lynn Batten
#84643
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Charles Lynn Batten is an American literary critic and a professor in the department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has won numerous teaching awards throughout his career at UCLA, including the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1981. ,
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Ken Keeler
#82763
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ken Keeler is an American television producer and writer. He has written for numerous television series, most notably The Simpsons and Futurama. According to an interview with David X. Cohen, he proved a theorem that appears in the Futurama episode "The Prisoner of Benda".
Go to Profile#4555
Mary Morrissy
#114120
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mary Morrissy is an Irish novelist and short story writer. She writes on art, fiction, and history. Morrissy is an elected member of Aosdána, Ireland's academy of artists and writers. Life Morrissy was born in Dublin. A graduate of Rathmines College and Technological University Dublin, she has taught creative writing in Ireland and the United States of America, notably in University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, University of Iowa, and University College Cork. Morrissy trained as a journalist and has worked as a reporter/feature writer/sub-editor on three of Ireland's national dailies.
Go to Profile#4556
Jeff Oaks
#81538
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jeff Oaks is an American poet and essayist who is a senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and the assistant director of the writing program. Background Born in 1964, Oaks was raised in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. According to Oaks, he started writing around age 17. Always fascinated by insects, Oaks originally planned to study entomology in college. However, he soon became bored with his science classes and turned his focus to creative writing. Oaks graduated from the Binghamton University with a bachelor's degree in English Literature.
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Richard Greenberg
#67047
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Richard Greenberg is an American playwright and television writer known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. He has had more than 25 plays premiere on and Off-Broadway in New York City and eight at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, including The Violet Hour, Everett Beekin, and Hurrah at Last.
Go to Profile#4558
Philip Edwards
#90197
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Philip Walter Edwards, was a British literary scholar. He was King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool from 1974 to 1990. He had previously taught at the University of Birmingham, Harvard University, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#4559
Tom Bailey
#87899
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Tom Bailey is an author, editor, and former teacher in the Creative Writing program at Susquehanna University. He has published two novels, a collection of short fiction, and two textbooks on writing short stories. He has also been widely published in anthologies and literary journals including New Stories From the South and DoubleTakes. The latter published his short story, Snow Dreams, which was selected for the 2000 The Pushcart Prize anthology and would become the basis for his debut novel, The Grace that Keeps this World.
Go to Profile#4560
William Hughes
#80872
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
William Hughes FRHistS FSA Scot is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, China: he has specialised in the study of Bram Stoker. He was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School and the University of East Anglia, and also holds a PGCE from Christ Church, Canterbury. He has presented radio programmes for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4, and has also appeared on live television through Living TV's Most Haunted Live!, most recently during the 2009 broadcast from St George's Hall, Liverpool. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in 2019, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
Go to Profile#4561
Frédéric Vitoux
#79086
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Frédéric Vitoux is a French writer and journalist. He is known as a novelist, biographer and literary columnist. His father was a journalist. He was elected at the Académie Française in 2001. In 2010, he won the Édouard Drumont literary prize for his novel Grand Hotel Nelson.
Go to Profile#4562
Peter Bagge
#72303
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Bagge is an American cartoonist whose best-known work includes the comics Hate and Neat Stuff. His stories often use black humor and exaggerated cartooning to dramatize the reduced expectations of middle-class American youth. He won two Harvey Awards in 1991, one for best cartoonist and one for his work on Hate. In recent decades Bagge has done more fact-based comics, everything from biographies to history to comics journalism. Publishers of Bagge's articles, illustrations, and comics include suck.com, MAD Magazine, toonlet, Discover, and the Weekly World News, with the comic strip Adventures of Batboy.
Go to Profile#4563
Guadalupe Grande
#75478
Overall Influence
1965 - 2021 (56 years)
Guadalupe Grande Aguirre was a Spanish poet. She had a degree in social anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Biography Guadalupe was the daughter of writer Félix Grande and was a cousin of poet Carlos Martínez Aguirre. A literary critic and teacher, she wrote El libro de Lilit in 1995, La llave de la niebla in 2003, and Mapas de cera in 2006.
Go to Profile#4564
Bogdan Czaykowski
#99184
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Bogdan Czaykowski was a Polish Canadian poet, essayist, literary translator and literary critic, professor emeritus and former Dean at the University of British Columbia. Czaykowski was born in Równe, Poland. In 1940 his family was deported to Siberia by the Communists, and his father died in a Gulag concentration camp, while his brother died of starvation. He wrote numerous articles in academic journals and literary magazines, and was the subject of literary research papers. Czaykowski received the Killam Prize in 1996 and several Polish literary awards, among others, from Fundacja Kościelsk...
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Iris M. Zavala
#101839
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Iris M. Zavala was a Puerto Rican author, scholar, and poet, who later lived in Barcelona, Spain. She had over 50 works to her name, plus hundreds of articles, dissertations, and conferences and many of her writings, including "Nocturna, mas no funesta", build on and express this belief.
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Suheil Bushrui
#78944
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Suheil Badi Bushrui was a professor, author, poet, critic, translator, and peace maker. He was a prominent scholar in regard to the life and works of the Lebanese-American author and poet Kahlil Gibran.
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David Clewell
#80018
Overall Influence
1955 - 2020 (65 years)
David Clewell was an American poet and creative writing instructor at Webster University. From 2010–2012, he served as the Poet Laureate of Missouri. Life Clewell was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1955 and attended Highland Park High School, in nearby Highland Park, where he first developed an interest in poetry. He graduated from University of Wisconsin with a B.A. in English. In 1979, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri and earned an M.F.A. in writing from Washington University in St. Louis. In 1985, Clewell began teaching in the English Department at Webster University. A year later, he...
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Helen Cross
#92192
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Helen Cross is an English author. Biography She was raised in the East Riding of Yorkshire and educated at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of East Anglia . Cross's first novel, My Summer of Love, was published in 2001 and was the winner of a Betty Trask Award in 2002. It was made into an acclaimed film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and starring Emily Blunt and Natalie Press. She also wrote The Secrets She Keeps, published in 2005. These two books are set in Yorkshire. Her third and latest novel, Spilt Milk, Black Coffee, was published in 2009..
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Michael H. Jameson
#105093
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Michael Hamilton Jameson was a classicist. At the time of his death he was Crossett Professor Emeritus of Humanistic Studies at Stanford University. His father, Raymond D. Jameson, professor of Western literature at the University of Peking, and mother, Rose Perel Jameson, were visiting London at the time of his birth. He spent his childhood in Beijing and with his mother in London, received his A.B. in Greek at the University of Chicago in 1942, aged seventeen, served in the U.S. Navy as a Japanese translator, 1943–46, then married Virginia Broyles. He received his Ph.D. at Chicago in 1949, with a dissertation on "The Offering at Meals: Its Place in Greek Sacrifice".
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Sam Riviere
#95179
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Sam Riviere is an English poet and publisher. Education and career Riviere was educated at Norwich School of Art and Design and completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2013. While at art school, Riviere played drums in indie band Le Tetsuo.
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Ann duCille
#89422
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ann duCille is Professor of English, Emerita at Wesleyan University who is a scholar of African-American literature, cultural studies, and Black feminist theory. Born in Brooklyn, New York, duCille earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bridgewater State College and then a Master's degree and PhD in English from Brown University.
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Martha Collins
#72832
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports , Because What Else Could I Do , Night Unto Night , Admit One: An American Scrapbook , Day Unto Day , White Papers , and Blue Front , as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Go to Profile#4573
Helen Lovatt
#119699
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Helen V. Lovatt is Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. She is known in particular for her work on Latin epic literature especially from the Flavian period. Career Lovatt studied at Millfield and then read Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she was awarded her PhD in 2000 with a dissertation on Games and realities in Statius, 'Thebaid 6'. Lovatt lectured at Keele University before moving to a Junior Research Fellowship at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. In 2003 Lovatt joined the department of Classics at the University of Nottingham. Lovatt delivered her inaugu...
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Brian Kiteley
#117387
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Brian Kiteley is an American novelist, and writing teacher. Life He grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. He has had residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Millay, Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He has taught at the American University in Cairo, Ohio University. He teaches at the University of Denver.
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Tara Welch
#109275
Overall Influence
Tara Welch is an American professor of classics at the University of Kansas. She has published two books, The Elegiac Cityscape: Propertius and the Meaning of Roman Monuments and Tarpeia: Workings of a Roman Myth . She was a co-editor for the work Oxford Readings in Propertius with Ellen Greene.
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Bachir Qamari
#102800
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
Bashir Qamari was a Moroccan literary critic, novelist and playwright. Biography Qamari was born in Nador in 1951. He studied Arabic literature at the Mohammed V University in Rabat . He was professor at the faculty of literature in Kenitra and taught contemporary literature at the Mohammed V University in Rabat.
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Maureen N. McLane
#110570
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Maureen McLane is an American poet, critic, and professor. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Life McLane was raised in upstate New York. She holds degrees from Harvard University, University of Oxford , and University of Chicago. She is the author of four books of poetry, including This Blue. My Poets , a hybrid of memoir and criticism, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. McLane is also a contributing editor at Boston Review and poetry editor at Grey. She is currently professor of English at New York University.
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Agate Nesaule
#107678
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Agate Nesaule was a Latvian-born American writer and professor of English on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Her 1995 memoir A Woman in Amber won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1996.
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John Byrne
#26190
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Patrick Byrne was a Scottish playwright and designer. He wrote The Slab Boys Trilogy, plays which explore working-class life in Scotland, and the TV dramas Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin' Heart. Byrne was also a painter, printmaker and theatre designer.
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Laura Moriarty
#89784
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Laura Moriarty is an American novelist. Early life and education Moriarty was born in Honolulu in 1970. She earned a degree in social work before earning an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas. She was the recipient of the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
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Adrian Blevins
#78201
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize . Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending , Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha . With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia , a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests.
Go to Profile#4582
Shiv Prasaad Singh
#101644
Overall Influence
1928 - 1998 (70 years)
Shiv Prasaad Singh was an Indian writer, university professor and scholar of the Hindi language. He is well-known for writing novels, short stories and critiques in Hindi. He was formerly a professor of Hindi literature in Benares Hindu University. He received the Kendra Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for his novel Neela Chand.
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Philip Lee Williams
#86853
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Philip Lee Williams is an American novelist, poet, and essayist noted for his explorations of the natural world, intense human relationships, and aging. A native of Athens, Georgia, he grew up in the nearby town of Madison. He is the winner of many literary awards for his 21 published books, including the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for his novel A Distant Flame , an examination of southerners who were against the Confederacy’s position in the American Civil War. He is also a winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his novel The Heart of a Distant Forest, and has been named Georgia Author of the Year four times.
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John V. Fleming
#75753
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John Vincent Fleming is an American literary scholar and the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Career Fleming was born on May 26, 1936 and graduated from The University of the South in 1958. After studying at Jesus College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, Fleming earned his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Princeton University in 1963 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "The Roman de la Rose and its manuscript illustrations", under the supervision of D. W. Robertson Jr. He spent two years as an instructor in ...
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Bengt Robertson
#111542
Overall Influence
1935 - 2008 (73 years)
Bengt A. Robertson was a Swedish physician. Robertson was primarily known for the development of the synthetic lung surfactant known as Corusurf. In 1996 he was awarded the King Faisal International Prize in Medicine together with Tetsurō Fujiwara for contributions to the understanding of neonatal medicine.
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Margarita Engle
#109606
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Margarita Engle is a Cuban American poet and author of many award-winning books for children, young adults and adults. Most of Engle's stories are written in verse and are a reflection of her Cuban heritage and her deep appreciation and knowledge of nature. She became the first Latino awarded a Newbery Honor in 2009 for The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom. She was selected by the Poetry Foundation to serve from 2017 to 2019 as the sixth Young People's Poet Laureate. On October 9, 2018, Margarita Engle was announced the winner of the 2019 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.
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David Bradby
#91022
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
David Bradby was a British drama and theatre academic with particular research interests in French theatre, Modernist / Postmodernist theatre, the role of the director and the Theatre of the Absurd. He wrote extensively on the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Roger Planchon, Jacques Lecoq, Arthur Adamov among many others. He also translated several works, principally by Michel Vinaver, Jacques Lecoq and Bernard-Marie Koltès.
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Gerald Costanzo
#131141
Overall Influence
Gerald Costanzo is an American poet and publisher. Since 1970, Costanzo has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has published more than three hundred poems, articles about poetry, and literary essays, as well as his own poetry collections and four edited anthologies.
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Anthony Petrosky
#53484
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Anthony Petrosky is an American poet, and professor. Life He received a doctorate from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He is associate dean of University of Pittsburgh School of Education.
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Christopher G. Moore
#79935
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian writer of twenty-seven novels, six works of non-fiction, editor of three anthologies, and author of four radio dramas. He is best known for his trilogy A Killing Smile , A Bewitching Smile and A Haunting Smile , a behind-the-smiles study of his adopted country, Thailand, and for his Vincent Calvino Private Eye series set in Bangkok. His novels have been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Thai.
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Colin Larkin
#90921
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Colin Larkin is a British writer. He founded, and was the editor-in-chief of, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Along with the ten-volume encyclopedia, Larkin also wrote the book All Time Top 1000 Albums, and edited the Guinness Who's Who of Jazz, the Guinness Who's Who of Blues, and the Virgin Encyclopedia of Heavy Rock. He has over 650,000 copies in print to date.
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Jaap Meijer
#95975
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Jaap Meijer was a Dutch Jewish historian, and poet. He wrote his poetry under the pseudonym Saul van Messel. Biography Meijer was born Jakob Meijer on 18 November 1912 in Winschoten, Netherlands, and was raised in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. At the age of 10, his father died, and it was decided to send him to the in Amsterdam to become a rabbi. During this period, he was involved in the zionist movement.
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Helen F. North
#122930
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Helen F. North was an American classical scholar and an expert on Greek and Roman literature. Early life and education North was the daughter of James H. and Catherine North. A native of Utica, she was educated at Cornell University, where she studied Classics, gaining a Bachelor's degree in 1942, a Master's in 1943 and a doctorate in 1945.
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Dušan Ivanić
#124695
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dušan Ivanić is a Serbian literary scholar and literary historian. Life and Work Dušan Ivanić was born in Gubavčevo Polje, a village near Gračac, at the time PR Croatia, FPR Yugoslavia. He studied at the former Department of Yugoslav literature and Serbo-Croatian language of the Philological Faculty of the University of Belgrade, graduated with Magister degree in 1975 and obtained his doctorate with thesis on Educational entertainment journals in Serbian literature of Realism in 1986. He was assistant , assistant professor , associate professor , became full professor in 1997, and he is professor emeritus at the department of Serbian literature of the faculty since 2015.
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Sharona Ben-Tov Muir
#68044
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sharona Muir is an American writer and academic. Early life She is the daughter of the late Israeli-American inventor and author, Itzhak Bentov who died as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 191 in 1979.
Go to Profile#4596
André Brochu
#104189
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
André Brochu is a poet, essayist and professor of Quebecois literature. Life He graduated from the Université de Montréal in 1961, and from Université Paris VIII. He has been a member of the Académie des Lettres du Québec since September 1996.
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Carole Morin
#109326
Overall Influence
Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. She has had five novels published: Lampshades, Penniless in Park Lane, Dead Glamorous, Spying on Strange Men and Fleshworld. Morin's fiction is critically acclaimed and has been described as 'Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour' and 'A Scottish nihilistic Catcher in the Rye'.
Go to Profile#4598
Jarosław Mikołajewski
#120074
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jarosław Mikołajewski is a Polish poet, writer and translator of the Italian language. He is also the author of children's books, essayist and journalist. Life and career Between 1983-1998, he worked at the Faculty of Italian Studies of the University of Warsaw. Since 1998, he has been working for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily newspaper. Between 2006-2012, he served as head of the Polish Institute in Rome.
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Tracy Ryan
#57116
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Tracy Ryan is an Australian poet and novelist. She has also worked as an editor, publisher, translator, and academic. Life Tracy Ryan was born in Western Australia, where she grew up as part of a large family. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from Curtin University and studied European languages at the University of Western Australia; her PhD was also from that university.
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Dennis Denisoff
#108579
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Dennis Denisoff is a Canadian author, poet and scholar, and the Endowed McFarlin Chair of Literature and Film in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. Denisoff was an early member of The Kootenay School of Writing.
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