Writers and literary biographies

Marcelo H. del Pilar

Marcelo H. del Pilar (Plaridel, 1850-1896), Filipino lawyer, journalist, and Propaganda Movement leader; editor of La Solidaridad, founder of Diariong Tagalog, anti-friar Tagalog satirist, died in Barcelona.

Marcin Bielski

Marcin Bielski, born Wolski (c. 1495–1575), was a Polish chronicler, poet, and soldier; his Kronika wszytkiego świata (1551) was the first universal history in Polish, continued by his son Joachim.

Marco Denevi

Marco Denevi (1922–1998) was an Argentine novelist, playwright, and screenwriter known for Rosaura a las diez (1955) and Ceremonia secreta (1960), both adapted to film.

Marco Girolamo Vida

Marco Girolamo Vida (c. 1485–1566) was an Italian humanist poet and bishop of Alba, best known for the Christiad, a Neo-Latin epic on the life of Christ.

Marcus Kliewer

Marcus Kliewer is a Canadian horror writer and stop-motion animator in Vancouver, author of We Used to Live Here (2024), which began as a Reddit NoSleep story, and The Caretaker (2026).

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood (born 1939, Ottawa) is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic, author of over fifty books including The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, and The Testaments, and a two-time Booker Prize winner.

Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison (1918–2007) was a Canadian poet whose Christian-inflected work won two Governor General's Awards and the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize for Concrete and Wild Carrot.

Margaret Busby

Margaret Busby, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born British publisher who co-founded Allison & Busby in 1967, becoming Britain's youngest and first Black woman publisher.

Margaret Drabble

Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd (born 5 June 1939, Sheffield), English novelist, biographer and editor; author of The Millstone, Jerusalem the Golden and The Radiant Way trilogy; editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature; sister of A.S. Byatt; DBE 2008.

Margaret Durrell

Margaret "Margo" Durrell (1919 or 1920 – 16 January 2007), later Margaret Duncan, sister of Lawrence, Leslie, and Gerald Durrell, ran a Bournemouth boarding house from 1947 and wrote the 1995 memoir Whatever Happened to Margo?.

Margaret Laurence

Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) was a Canadian novelist, born Jean Margaret Wemyss in Neepawa, Manitoba, whose Manawaka fiction, above all The Stone Angel and The Diviners, made her a central figure in Canadian literature.

Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), Atlanta journalist and author of Gone With the Wind (1936), the 1,037-page Civil War novel that won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, sold over 30 million copies, and became a 1939 Oscar-winning film.

Margaret Oliphant

Margaret Oliphant, known as Mrs. Oliphant, was a Scottish novelist, biographer, and historian (1828–1897) who published about 98 novels and wrote for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for nearly fifty years.

Margaret Wise Brown

Margaret Wise Brown (1910–1952), also published as Golden MacDonald and Juniper Sage, American picture-book author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny; Bank Street 'here-and-now' pioneer who wrote over 100 children's books.

Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) was an English Christian mystic from Bishop's Lynn, Norfolk, whose dictated Book is the first known English autobiography.

Margo Glantz

Margo Glantz, born Margarita Glantz Shapiro in 1930, is a Mexican writer and literary critic known for Las genealogías and her scholarship on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Margot Asquith

Margot Asquith, née Tennant (1864–1945), Countess of Oxford and Asquith, British political hostess, diarist, and author; second wife of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, known for her candid two-volume autobiography (1920, 1922) and Great War diary.

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.

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras, pen name of Marguerite Donnadieu (1914–1996), French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker; author of L'Amant (1984), the Hiroshima mon amour screenplay, and India Song (1975).

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.

Maria Campbell

Maria Campbell (born 1940) is a Métis writer, playwright, and filmmaker from northern Saskatchewan, best known for Halfbreed, her 1973 autobiography and a foundational work of Indigenous literature in Canada.

Maria Dąbrowska

Maria Dąbrowska, born in 1889 near Kalisz, was a Polish novelist and diarist best known for the four-part family saga Noce i dnie (Nights and Days).

María de Zayas

María de Zayas (1590, Madrid – ca. 1660) was a Spanish novelist of the Siglo de Oro, best known for Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos.

Maria Edgeworth

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and children's writer whose Irish novels of 1800 to 1817, beginning with Castle Rackrent, pioneered the regional novel in English and influenced Walter Scott and Jane Austen.

María Enriqueta Camarillo

María Enriqueta Camarillo was a Mexican poet, novelist, and translator born in 1872 in Coatepec, Veracruz, who lived and published in Madrid for more than thirty years.

Maria Gripe

Maria Gripe, born Maria Walter, was a leading Swedish author of children's and youth books whose 38 books, including Hugo och Josefin, were translated into more than 25 languages.

Maria Jotuni

Maria Jotuni (1880–1943) was a Finnish writer and playwright, a pioneer of modernist prose and drama whose satirical plays included Miehen kylkiluu and Kultainen vasikka.

Maria Konopnicka

Maria Konopnicka, born Maria Wasiłowska (1842–1910), was a leading Polish poet, short-story writer, and children's author of the positivist period, also known for the patriotic poem Rota.

María Luisa Bombal

María Luisa Bombal (1910–1980) was a Chilean novelist and short-story writer born in Viña del Mar whose novels La última niebla (1935) and La amortajada (1938) brought avant-garde technique and women's inner lives into Chilean literature.