Post-1945 novelists

Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar, born Marguerite de Crayencour, was a French novelist and essayist who wrote Mémoires d'Hadrien and in 1980 became the first woman elected to the Académie française.

Marie Luise Kaschnitz

Marie Luise Kaschnitz, née von Holzing-Berstett (1901–1974), was a German poet and writer of stories, radio plays, and diary prose who won the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1955.

Martin Walser

Martin Walser (1927–2023) was a German novelist, playwright, and essayist and a leading figure of postwar German literature, known for works like Ein fliehendes Pferd.

Mati Unt

Mati Unt (1944–2005) was an Estonian writer, essayist, and theater director whose innovative prose shaped modernist and postmodernist Estonian literature; his best-known novel is Sügisball (1979).

Michel Butor

Michel Butor (1926–2016) was a French novelist, essayist, and poet associated with the nouveau roman, known for La Modification, winner of the 1957 Prix Renaudot.

Michel Houellebecq (Michel Thomas), French novelist and poet born 1956 on Réunion; author of Les Particules élémentaires, Plateforme, Soumission, and Goncourt winner La Carte et le territoire; known for succès de scandale reception and prizes.

Miguel Delibes

Miguel Delibes (Miguel Delibes Setién, 1920–2010) was a Spanish novelist and journalist whose work centers on rural Castile; he won the Premio Cervantes in 1993.

Miguel Torga

Miguel Torga, pen name of Adolfo Correia Rocha (1907–1995), was a Portuguese poet, short-story writer, and physician, remembered for his sixteen-volume Diário and stories of Trás-os-Montes.

Mikael Niemi

Mikael Niemi (born 1959) is a Swedish author from Pajala in Norrbotten whose comic and crime novels draw on the Tornedalian region, best known for Popular Music from Vittula.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1929–2023), Czech-French novelist and essayist, author of The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being; exiled to France in 1975, stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, wrote in French from 1993.

Monika Fagerholm

Monika Fagerholm, born 1961 in Kyrkslätt, Finland, is a Finland-Swedish author writing in Swedish, one of Finland's internationally best-known writers and winner of the August, Finlandia, and Nordic Council Literature Prizes.

Mustafa Kutlu

Mustafa Kutlu (born 1947) is a Turkish storyteller, essayist, and columnist, a prominent figure of the Turkish short story whose work draws on Sufi themes.

Nathalie Sarraute

Nathalie Sarraute (Natalia Tcherniak, 1900–1999), Russian-born French novelist, playwright, and lawyer; nouveau roman pioneer; author of Tropismes, L'Ère du soupçon, Le Planétarium, and Enfance.

Nedim Gürsel

Nedim Gürsel, born 1951 in Gaziantep, is a Turkish novelist and critic who has lived in Paris since 1971, teaching Turkish literature at the Sorbonne and working at CNRS.

Nelio Biedermann

Nelio Biedermann, born 2003 in Zurich, is a Swiss novelist. His historical family saga Lázár (2025) sold more than 200,000 copies in German and was shortlisted for the Schweizer Buchpreis.

Nicolas Born

Nicolas Born, born Klaus Jürgen Born (1937 to 1979), was a German novelist, poet, and essayist, a leading figure of the Neue Subjektivität whose last novel, Die Fälschung, was filmed by Volker Schlöndorff.

Oğuz Atay

Oğuz Atay (1934–1977) was a Turkish novelist and civil engineer whose experimental first novel Tutunamayanlar, ignored in his lifetime, became one of Turkish literature's most reprinted works.

Oksana Zabuzhko

Oksana Zabuzhko, born 1960 in Lutsk, is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, and essayist whose 1996 novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex became an international event in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature.

Oles Honchar

Oles Honchar (Олесь Гончар) was a Ukrainian writer and public figure whose 1968 novel Sobor (The Cathedral) won readers and was then suppressed by party censorship.

Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk, Polish novelist born 1962 in Sulechow, author of Flights and The Books of Jacob; 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded 2019) and 2018 International Booker Prize winner.

P. C. Jersild

P. C. Jersild, full name Per Christian Jersild, is a Swedish novelist and physician born in 1935 whose satirical fiction takes up social and ethical questions from medicine.

Paavo Rintala

Paavo Rintala (1930–1999) was a Finnish novelist and playwright regarded as a moral conscience of Finnish literature, whose war novels and Mannerheim trilogy stirred strong public controversy.

Pär Lagerkvist

Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974) was a Swedish writer and member of the Swedish Academy who won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Literature, best known for his novel Barabbas (1950).

Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano, born in 1945 near Paris, is a French novelist whose books return to the German Occupation of Paris; he won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Pavel Vilikovský

Pavel Vilikovský (1941–2020) was a Slovak prose writer and translator, a central figure in Slovak postmodern literature and the only two-time winner of the Anasoft litera award.

Per Olov Enquist

Per Olov Enquist, known as PO Enquist, was a Swedish novelist and playwright, a leading author of his generation who won the August Prize for Livläkarens besök (1999).

Per Petterson

Per Petterson is a Norwegian novelist, born in Oslo in 1952, whose restrained fiction about family, loss, and memory, including Out Stealing Horses (2003), has won major international prizes.

Peter Bichsel

Peter Bichsel (1935–2025) was a Swiss writer of German known for very short prose. He made his breakthrough in 1964 and later won the Prize of the Gruppe 47.

Péter Esterházy

Péter Esterházy (Esterházy Péter, 1950–2016) was a Hungarian writer and essayist, winner of the Kossuth Prize, whose family novel Harmonia caelestis (2000) brought postmodern technique into Hungarian literature.