1. Miguel de Cervantes 1547 – 1616
In Cervantes’ early life he enrolled as a soldier and was kept prisoner as a slave for several years until his family raised a ransom. After this he became a civil servant, but money remained a problem. He wrote in many different fields, including novels, play, poems and short stories, creating his masterpiece in Don Quixote. He is now regarded as the main figure in Spanish literature, and Don Quixote has been hailed as the first great novel.
2. William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616
A playwright, poet and actor, Shakespeare’s work, written for the company of a London theatre, has seen him called one of the world’s great dramatists. He enjoyed success in his lifetime but has gone on to ever greater and wider appreciation for works like Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, as well as his sonnets. Perhaps strangely, although we know quite a lot about him, there is a constant current of people who doubt he wrote the works.
3. Voltaire 1694 - 1778
Voltaire was the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet, one of the greatest French writers. He worked in many forms, imparting wit, critique and satire against the religious and political system which saw him become hugely famous during his one lifetime. His most known works are Candide and his letters, which encompass enlightenment thought. During his life he spoke on many non-literary subjects like science and philosophy; critics have even blamed him for the French Revolution.
4. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm 1785 – 1863 / 1786 - 1859
Known collectively as “The Brothers Grimm”, Jacob and Wilhelm are remembered today for their collection of folk tales, which helped start the study of folklore. However, their work in linguistics and philology, during which they compiled a dictionary of the German language, coupled with their folk tales, helped forge the idea of a modern “German” national identity.
5. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
Best known abroad for his 1862 novel Les Misérables, thanks in part to a modern musical, Hugo is remembered in France as a great poet, one of the nation’s most important Romantic era writers and as a symbol of French republicanism. The latter was thanks to Hugo’s activity in public life, in which he supported liberalism and the republic, as the period he spread in exile and opposition during the Second Empire under Napoleon III.
6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
Having been hailed as great by a vicious critic for his first novella, Dostoyevsky’s career took a difficult turn when he joined a group of intellectuals discussing socialism. He was arrested and put though a mock execution, complete with last rights, then imprisoned in Siberia. When free, he wrote works such as Crime and Punishment, examples of his superb grasp of psychology. He is considered an all time great novelist.
7. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
Born to wealthy aristocratic parents who died while he was still young, Tolstoy began his career in writing before serving in the Crimean War. After he this turned to a mixture of teaching and writing, creating what have been labelled two of the great novels in literature: War and Peace, set during the Napoleonic Wars and Anna Karenina. During his lifetime, and ever since, he has been considered a master of human observation.
8. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
Although famed as a great novelist and critic, French author Zola is known primarily in historical circles for an open letter he wrote. Entitled “J’accuse” and printed on the front page of a newspaper, it was an attack on the upper ranks of the French military for their anti-Semitism and corruption of justice in falsely condemning a Jewish officer called Alfred Dreyfus to prison. Charged with libel, Zola fled to England, but returned to France after the government fell. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated.
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