Writers and literary biographies

Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) was a Croatian linguist, journalist, and political leader who led the Illyrian Movement, reformed Croatian orthography, and saw Croatian made the official language in 1847.

The Llewelyn Davies boys, George, Jack, Peter, Michael, and Nicholas, were the family whose friendship with J. M. Barrie inspired Peter Pan; orphaned in 1907 and 1910, they were raised under his guardianship.

Lloyd Jones

Lloyd Jones, born in 1955 in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, is a novelist and memoirist whose novel Mister Pip won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book Award.

Loiq Sherali

Loiq Sherali (Tajik: Лоиқ Шералӣ; Loiq or Layeq) was a Tajik poet who revived classical Persian forms and won the Rudaki State Prize in 1978.

Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry (born Lois Ann Hammersberg, 1937) is an American children's and young adult author, two-time Newbery Medal winner for Number the Stars and The Giver, creator of the Giver quartet and Anastasia Krupnik series.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949), American science fiction and fantasy author of the Vorkosigan Saga and the World of the Five Gods; winner of seven Hugo and three Nebula Awards and the 36th Damon Knight Grand Master.

Lola Rodríguez de Tió

Lola Rodríguez de Tió, born Dolores Rodríguez de Astudillo y Ponce de León, was a Puerto Rican poet and independence activist who wrote the original lyrics of "La Borinqueña."

Longus

Longus (Λόγγος) is the ancient Greek author of Daphnis and Chloe, a pastoral romance in four books, probably written in the late 2nd century CE on Lesbos.

Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (Bosie, 1870-1945), English poet, son of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, and lover of Oscar Wilde; his 1895 libel crisis with Wilde, later Catholic conversion, marriage to Olive Custance, and 1924 imprisonment for libelling Winston Churchill distinguish him from other Douglas namesakes.

Lord Byron

Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron, 1788–1824) was an English Romantic poet and peer whose Childe Harold's Pilgrimage made him a celebrity in 1812 and whose Don Juan became a landmark.

Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), pen name of Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish fantasy pioneer, author of The Gods of Pegana and The King of Elfland's Daughter, and an influence on Lovecraft.

Lorenzo Carcaterra

Lorenzo Carcaterra is an American writer of crime fiction and memoir, born in 1954 in New York, best known for the bestseller Sleepers and for writing Law & Order.

Lorenzo Valla

Lorenzo Valla (c. 1406–1457) was an Italian humanist, philologist, and priest who exposed the Donation of Constantine as a forgery in 1440 and pioneered historical-philological criticism.

Lorine Niedecker

Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) was an American poet of the Objectivist circle around Louis Zukofsky who wrote short, spare, sound-driven poems while living on Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin.

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Lorna Dee Cervantes (born 1954) is an American poet, a major voice in Chicana literature, known for Emplumada (1981), which won the American Book Award, and From the Cables of Genocide (1991).

Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison is a Jamaican poet, painter, and memoirist who served as Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2017 to 2020, the first woman in the role.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore (Marie Lorena Moore, born 1957, Glens Falls, New York) is an American short-story writer and novelist, author of Self-Help, Birds of America, Bark, and the NBCC Award-winning novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home; known for second-person narration and deadpan wit.

Louis Aragon

Louis Aragon (1897–1982) was a French poet, novelist, and editor, a founder of Surrealism who co-founded the review Littérature in 1919 and joined the Communist Party in 1927.

Louis Artus

Louis Artus (1870–1960) was a French dramatist, novelist, and critic who wrote vaudevilles and comedies for the Parisian stage from 1893 to 1911, best remembered for Cœur de moineau.

Louis Couperus

Louis Couperus was a Dutch novelist, born in The Hague in 1863 and died in 1923, regarded as one of the greatest writers in Dutch literature.

Louis Ducros

Louis Ducros (1846–1927) was a French literary historian who taught at Poitiers and Aix, wrote on Diderot and Rousseau, and won three Académie française prizes.

Louis L'Amour

Louis L'Amour (Louis Dearborn LaMoore, 1908–1988), American Western novelist, author of Hondo and the Sackett saga; sold over 200 million books, won the 1984 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice (Frederick Louis MacNeice, 1907-1963), Belfast-born Irish poet, critic, and BBC broadcaster of the Auden-era 1930s generation; author of Autumn Journal, Letters from Iceland, and The Burning Perch.

Louis Paul Boon

Louis Paul Boon (1912–1979), born Lodewijk Paul Aalbrecht Boon, was a Flemish novelist and journalist from Aalst, Belgium, and a leading renovator of Dutch-language prose.

Louis Sachar

Louis Sachar (born 1954) is an American children's author, creator of the Wayside School series and Holes, which won the 1998 National Book Award and 1999 Newbery Medal; his first adult novel is The Magician of Tiger Castle (2025).

Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), American poet, critic, and prolific anthologist of Modern American Poetry; former New York jeweler, What's My Line panelist removed in 1951, and Library of Congress poetry consultant 1961-1963.

Louis Zukofsky

Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) was an American avant-garde poet from New York City's Lower East Side, best known for the long poem "A" and for coining the term "objectivists" for 1930s modernist poets.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name of Louis Ferdinand Destouches (1894–1961), French novelist and physician, author of Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932) and Mort à crédit (1936), revolutionary stylist and author of antisemitic pamphlets 1937–1941.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), American author born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, raised in Concord, Massachusetts, best known for Little Women (1868-69) and also wrote sensation fiction under pseudonyms A. M. Barnard and Flora Fairfield; Civil War nurse whose Hospital Sketches (1863) made her famous.