Writers and literary biographies

Pierre Jean Jouve

Pierre Jean Jouve (1887–1976) was a French poet, novelist, and critic who renounced his early pacifist work around 1924 and rebuilt his writing on psychoanalysis and Christian mysticism.

Pierre Loti

Pierre Loti, pen name of French naval officer Julien Viaud (1850–1923), wrote about forty novels from his seagoing career and joined the Académie française in 1891.

Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs (Pierre-Félix Louis, 1870–1925), French Parnassian poet and novelist, author of the Bilitis hoax (1894) and Aphrodite (1896), friend of Gide, Valéry, and Debussy.

Pierre-Henri Simon

Pierre-Henri Simon (1903–1972) was a French novelist, poet, and literary critic who held Le Monde's literary column from 1961 and was elected to the Académie française in 1966.

Piers Anthony (Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob, born 1934), American fantasy and science fiction author, creator of the pun-filled Xanth series beginning with A Spell for Chameleon, plus Incarnations of Immortality and Apprentice Adept.

Piet Hein

Piet Hein (1905–1996) was a Danish poet, designer, and inventor who wrote nearly 10,000 short aphoristic grooks and created the superellipse curve used in furniture and city squares.

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581–1647) was a Dutch Golden Age poet, playwright, and historian, called the head of the Dutch poets, who served as Drost of Muiden.

Pietro Aretino

Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), Italian satirist, playwright, and letter writer of Arezzo and Venice, author of the Ragionamenti, La Cortigiana, and six books of Lettere; called flagello dei principi, later indexed by the Church.

Pietro Bembo

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) was a Venetian humanist, Petrarchan poet, and cardinal whose Prose della volgar lingua (1525) set the standard of written Italian for centuries.

Pimen Panchenko

Pimen Panchenko (Пімен Панчанка) was a Belarusian poet, translator, and journalist who served as a war correspondent and was named People's Poet of Belarus in 1973.

Pío Baroja

Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872–1956) was a Spanish novelist of the Generation of '98 who wrote almost a hundred novels, including Zalacaín el aventurero and El árbol de la ciencia.

Pip Williams (author)

Pip Williams is an Australian novelist and social researcher renowned for historical fiction set in Oxford, specifically The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) and The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023).

Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman, American author of the 2010 memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, served 13 months of a 15-month sentence at FCI Danbury for money laundering in a drug trafficking scheme; her book became Jenji Kohan's Emmy-winning Netflix series.

Pir Husamuddin Rashdi

Pir Husamuddin Rashdi (پير حسام الدين راشدي), 1911 to 1982, was a Pakistani historian, biographer, and journalist who edited Persian manuscripts on Sindh's history into Sindhi and Urdu.

Pius Ngandu Nkashama

Pius Ngandu Nkashama (1946–2023) was a Congolese novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic who wrote in French and Tshiluba and taught at Louisiana State University.

Piyadasa Sirisena

Piyadasa Sirisena (පියදාස සිරිසේන, 1875–1946) was a Sinhala novelist, poet, and journalist called the father of the Sinhala novel, with over twenty novels to his name.

Pınar Kür

Pınar Kür (1943–2025) was a Turkish novelist, playwright, and translator, best known for Yarın Yarın (1976) and as a pioneer of feminist literature in Türkiye.

Pjetër Bogdani

Pjetër Bogdani, known in Italian as Pietro Bogdano, was an Albanian Catholic archbishop and writer who authored Cuneus Prophetarum, the first major prose work in Albanian.

Poet

A poet is a person who composes poems, from Greek poētēs 'maker'. Covers written and oral poets, from Gilgamesh and Homer to griots and Finnegan's oral case studies, plus ethnopoetics and AI-poetry comparisons.

Poet laureate

Poet laureate: an official poet appointed by a state or body, first formally created for John Dryden in 1668; covers the UK ten-year laureateship, the US Library of Congress position (1937, renamed 1985), duties, pay, and national variants.

Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom

The Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, also called the British laureateship, is an honorary royal post dating to Ben Jonson's 1616 pension and formally created for John Dryden in 1668; since 1999 a ten-year term, currently held by Simon Armitage.

Political views of J. K. Rowling

Political views of J.K. Rowling: the British author's Labour donation of £1m in 2008, opposition to Scottish independence via £1m to Better Together, Remain campaigning in 2016, and her post-2019 stance on sex and gender, including the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund and For Women Scotland funding.