249 articles
Jan Kjærstad
Jan Kjærstad (born 1953) is a Norwegian novelist and essayist, a central figure in recent Norwegian literature best known for the Jonas Wergeland trilogy, which earned the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2001.
Jean Raspail
Jean Raspail (Jean Paul Raspail, 5 July 1925 – 13 June 2020), French novelist, journalist, and explorer; author of Le Camp des saints (1973) and Moi, Antoine de Tounens; Académie française Grand Prix du Roman 1981.
Jessica Durlacher
Jessica Durlacher is a Dutch novelist, columnist, and screenwriter born in Amsterdam in 1961, known for novels about children of Holocaust survivors, including the bestseller De dochter (2000).
Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Jón Kalman Stefánsson, an Icelandic novelist and poet born in Reykjavík in 1963, made his international breakthrough with the Trilogy About the Boy, set in remote Icelandic fishing communities.
José Cardoso Pires
José Augusto Neves Cardoso Pires (1925–1998) was a Portuguese writer of novels, stories, and plays, known for O Delfim and Balada da Praia dos Cães and his dry, adjective-free prose.
José Saramago
José Saramago (1922–2010), Portuguese novelist and 1998 Nobel laureate in literature, author of Blindness, Memorial do Convento, and The Gospel according to Jesus Christ; exiled to Lanzarote in 1993 after state censorship.
Josef Škvorecký
Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012), Czech-Canadian novelist, translator, and co-founder of Toronto exile press '68 Publishers; author of The Cowards, The Miracle Game, and The Engineer of Human Souls.
Juan Marsé
Juan Marsé Carbó, born Juan Faneca Roca (1933–2020), was a Spanish novelist whose fiction of postwar Barcelona made him one of Spain's major writers, winning the Cervantes Prize.
Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq, born Louis Poirier, was a French novelist and schoolteacher best known for refusing the 1951 Prix Goncourt for his novel Le Rivage des Syrtes.
Juozas Aputis
Juozas Aputis (1936–2010) was a Lithuanian prose writer, editor, translator, and critic who modernized the Lithuanian short story during the Soviet-era revival of the 1970s and 1980s.
Jurgis Kunčinas
Jurgis Kunčinas (1947–2002) was a prominent Lithuanian writer, poet, and translator from German, best known for the novel Tūla (1993), an acclaimed portrayal of Vilnius.
Kader Abdolah
Kader Abdolah is the pen name of Iranian-born Dutch writer Hossein Sadjadi, who fled Iran in 1985 and became one of the Netherlands' most-read authors.
Kerstin Ekman
Kerstin Ekman, née Hjorth, is a Swedish novelist and essayist born in 1933 who debuted as a crime writer in 1959 and became one of Sweden's most widely read authors.
Kerstin Thorvall
Kerstin Thorvall, full name Kerstin Hilma Margareta Thorvall (1925–2010), was a Swedish author and illustrator whose frank 1976 novel Det mest förbjudna is now a classic.
Kirsten Thorup
Kirsten Thorup, born 1942 in Gelsted on Funen, is a Danish author of poetry, novels, drama, and television scripts, central to Danish literature since the late 1960s.
Kjartan Fløgstad
Kjartan Fløgstad, born 1944, is a Norwegian novelist, poet, essayist, and translator who writes in Nynorsk; his breakthrough novel Dalen Portland (1977) won the Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Kjell Westö
Kjell Westö, born 1961 in Helsinki, is a Finland-Swedish novelist and journalist known for epic novels set in Helsinki; he won the Finlandia Prize in 2006 and the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2014.
Knut Faldbakken
Knut Faldbakken, born 1941 in Oslo, is a Norwegian novelist of psychological fiction known for Sin mors hus (1969), the dystopian Uår, and Adams dagbok (1978), with books translated into 18 languages.
Kornel Filipowicz
Kornel Filipowicz (1913–1990) was a Polish novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter based in Kraków, the longtime partner of the Nobel laureate poet Wisława Szymborska.
Ladislav Fuks
Ladislav Fuks (1923–1994) was a Czech prose writer best known for psychological fiction about fear, persecution, and the Holocaust, including Pan Theodor Mundstock and The Cremator.
Lars Gustafsson
Lars Gustafsson (1936–2016) was a Swedish writer and philosopher, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, best known for the novel cycle Cracks in the Wall.
Lars Gyllensten
Lars Gyllensten (1921–2006) was a Swedish author, physician, and histologist who was permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and chaired the Nobel Foundation from 1987 to 1993.
Lars Saabye Christensen
Lars Saabye Christensen is a Norwegian novelist, poet, and screenwriter born in Oslo in 1953 whose breakthrough novel Beatles (1984) became one of Norway's biggest sales successes.
László Krasznahorkai
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter, born in 1954, known for absurdist fiction in long winding sentences and the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Luigi Meneghello
Luigi Meneghello (1922–2007) was an Italian writer, partisan, and University of Reading professor known for his experimental prose and for I piccoli maestri and Libera nos a malo.
Luis Martín-Santos
Luis Martín-Santos (1924–1964) was a Spanish psychiatrist, novelist, and anti-Franco militant, known for Tiempo de silencio (1962), the novel that opened the experimental phase of postwar Spanish fiction.
Luise Rinser
Luise Rinser (1911–2002) was a German writer of novels, stories, essays, and diaries, one of the most widely read postwar German authors; her breakthrough novel was Mitte des Lebens (1950).
Lyudmila Ulitskaya (Людмила Евгеньевна Улицкая)
Lyudmila Ulitskaya (Людмила Улицкая), also Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya, born 1943, is a Russian novelist who won the Russian Booker Prize in 2001 and lives in Germany.
Majgull Axelsson
Majgull Axelsson (born 1947) is a Swedish journalist and novelist whose fiction portrays vulnerable people; her breakthrough novel Aprilhäxan (1997) won the August Prize.
Margriet de Moor
Margriet de Moor, pen name of Margaretha Maria Antonette Neefjes, is a Dutch novelist born in 1941 whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages.