Early 20th-century novelists

Axel Bakunts

Axel Bakunts (Ակսել Բակունց), born Alexander Tevosyan, was an Armenian short-story writer and agronomist known for stories of Zangezur village life, executed in Stalin's Great Purge in 1937.

B. Traven

B. Traven, pseudonym of a German-Mexican novelist also known as Ret Marut, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Death Ship; twelve novels, 40 million copies, identity still disputed.

Boris Pilnyak

Boris Pilnyak (Борис Пильняк), born Boris Andreyevich Vogau, was a leading Russian Soviet prose writer of the 1920s, best known for The Naked Year and executed in 1938.

Boris Vian

Boris Vian was a French novelist, jazz trumpeter, and songwriter, author of L'Écume des jours (1947) and, as Vernon Sullivan, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes.

Boris Zaytsev (writer)

Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev (Борис Константинович Зайцев) was a Russian writer and dramatist of the Silver Age, recognized before 1917, who emigrated to Paris in 1922.

Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a Polish prose writer and graphic artist of Jewish origin, known for the short story collections The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium under the Hourglass.

Carl Erik Soya

Carl Erik Soya (1896–1983) was a Danish writer of satirical novels, plays, and screenplays, a radical renewer of Danish drama best known through film adaptations of his work.

Carry van Bruggen

Carry van Bruggen, pen name of Carolina Lea de Haan (1881–1932), was a Dutch writer whose final novel Eva (1927) was the first Dutch novel of consciousness.

Cécile Tormay

Cécile Tormay (1875–1937) was a Hungarian novelist and editor, the leading female figure of the Horthy-era counter-revolution, founding president of MANSZ and author of the memoir An Outlaw's Diary.

Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade (חיים גראַדע) was a Yiddish poet and novelist born in Vilna in 1910, known for works including "My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner" and The Yeshiva.

Charles Braibant

Charles Braibant (1889–1976) was a French archivist and novelist who directed the Archives de France from 1948 to 1959 and won the 1933 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le roi dort.

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz

Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947) was a Swiss French-language novelist from Lausanne, counted among the greatest French-speaking Swiss writers, known for L'Histoire du soldat and Derborence.

Charles Plisnier

Charles Plisnier (1896–1952) was a Belgian francophone novelist, poet, and lawyer who in 1937 became the first writer without French nationality to win the Prix Goncourt.

Colette

Colette, in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), was a French novelist, journalist, and performer whose work drew closely on her own life, including Chéri and the Claudine novels.

Concha Espina

Concha Espina (Concepción Espina y Tagle, 1869–1955) was a Spanish novelist and journalist, the first Spanish woman nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, losing by one vote in 1926.

Cora Sandel

Cora Sandel, pen name of Sara Fabricius (1880–1974), was a Norwegian writer and painter best known for the semi-autobiographical Alberte trilogy about a woman's path to becoming a writer.

David Bergelson

David Bergelson (דוד בערגעלסאָן, 1884–1952) was a Yiddish novelist, dramatist, and literary editor, considered the first and most important Yiddish modernist prose writer of the twentieth century.

Dezső Szabó (1879–January 1945) was a Hungarian novelist, political satirist, and polemicist whose expressionist prose renewed Hungarian literary language; his 1919 novel Az elsodort falu sold some 200,000 copies.

Dinko Šimunović

Dinko Šimunović (1873–1933) was a Croatian writer of the modernist Croatian Moderna, best known for psychological novellas such as Duga, Muljika, and Alkar set in rural Dalmatian Zagora.

Dino Buzzati

Dino Buzzati, full name Buzzati-Traverso, was an Italian novelist, journalist, and painter who spent four decades at Corriere della Sera and won the 1958 Premio Strega.

Dominik Tatarka

Dominik Tatarka (1913–1989) was a Slovak prose writer, essayist, and publicist whose satirical novel The Demon of Consent is regarded as a central work of Slovak literature.

E. du Perron

E. du Perron, pen name of Charles Edgar du Perron (1899–1940), was a Dutch writer born in the Dutch East Indies who co-founded the journal Forum.

Édouard Estaunié

Édouard Estaunié (1862–1942) was a French novelist and telecommunications engineer who rose to inspecteur général des Télégraphes, wrote twelve novels on the hidden inner life, and was elected to the Académie française in 1923.

Eduard Vilde

Eduard Vilde (1865–1933) was an Estonian writer, journalist, and diplomat, a classic of Estonian literature and one of the founders of the Estonian novel, known for Külmale maale.

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti (1905–1994), Bulgarian-born Sephardic German-language writer, Nobel laureate 1981, author of the novel Auto-da-Fé (Die Blendung) and the crowd-psychology study Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht), and of a celebrated memoir trilogy.

Elias Venezis

Elias Venezis was a Greek novelist born in Ayvalık, Asia Minor, in 1904, best known for Number 31328, based on his captivity as a prisoner in 1922.

Elin Wägner

Elin Wägner (1882–1949) was a Swedish writer, journalist, and social critic who campaigned for women's suffrage, peace, and the environment, becoming the second woman elected to the Swedish Academy after Selma Lagerlöf.

Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini (1908–1966) was an Italian novelist, translator, and editor, author of Conversazione in Sicilia and founder of the postwar journals Il Politecnico and Il Menabò.

Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti

Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, also published as Marien Kind, was an Austrian baroness and novelist (1871–1955) who led German-language Catholic historical fiction before her books were banned under the Nazis.