Writers and literary biographies

Veikko Antero Koskenniemi

Veikko Antero Koskenniemi (1885–1962) was a Finnish poet, professor of literary history, and rector of the University of Turku, best known for the Finlandia hymn lyrics.

Velimir Khlebnikov (Велимир Хлебников)

Velimir Khlebnikov (Велимир Хлебников, born Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov, 1885–1922), Russian Futurist poet, co-inventor of zaum, author of Zangezi and Ladomir, 'King of Time' and 'Chairman of the Globe'.

Velleius Paterculus

Velleius Paterculus (c. 20 BCE – after 30 CE) was a Roman officer, senator, and historian, author of a two-book Roman History from the fall of Troy to Tiberius.

Venantius Fortunatus

Venantius Fortunatus was an Italian-born Latin poet who made his career in Merovingian Gaul, became bishop of Poitiers around 599, and wrote hymns still sung in the Catholic liturgy.

Venedikt Erofeev

Venedikt Erofeev (Венедикт Васильевич Ерофеев; 1938–1990) was a Soviet-era Russian writer best known for the prose poem Moscow–Petushki, a samizdat classic about a drunkard's train journey.

Veniamin Kaverin

Veniamin Kaverin (Вениамин Каверин; born Veniamin Zilber, 1902–1989) was a Soviet Russian prose writer best known for the adventure novel Two Captains, winner of the 1946 Stalin Prize.

Vennikulam Gopala Kurup

Vennikulam Gopala Kurup (1902–1980) was an Indian poet, playwright, translator, and lexicographer who wrote in Malayalam. His Kamasurabhi won the Sahitya Akademi's 1974 award for Malayalam poetry.

Ventura García Calderón

Ventura García Calderón (1886–1959) was a Peruvian novelist, short-story writer, and diplomat who spent most of his life in Paris; his most emblematic work is La venganza del cóndor (1924).

Ventura López

Ventura López, in full Ventura Fernández López (1866–1944), was a Spanish priest, journalist, archaeologist, and cervantist who settled in Toledo, where his eccentricity made him famous as el Cura Loco.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata (1937–2026) was a Lebanese-born French-language poet and novelist who settled in Paris in 1972 and won the Prix Apollinaire and the Prix Goncourt de la poésie.

Vera Brittain

Vera Mary Brittain (1893–1970), English feminist, pacifist, and author of the First World War memoir Testament of Youth (1933); Somerville College VAD nurse who lost her fiancé, brother, and two friends, and joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1937.

Vera Duarte

Vera Duarte is a Cape Verdean poet, judge, and human rights activist born in Mindelo in 1952, and the first woman to win the Tchicaya U Tam'si Prize.

Vera Inber

Vera Inber (Вера Инбер), born Vera Shpentser, was a Russian and Soviet poet whose diary Pochti tri goda recorded the nearly three years she spent in blockaded Leningrad.

Vergílio Ferreira

Vergílio Ferreira, born Vergílio António Ferreira, was a Portuguese novelist, essayist, and diarist, a leading existentialist writer of the 20th century who won the 1992 Camões Prize.

Vernatun

Vernatun (Armenian: Վերնատուն, "the garret") was an Armenian literary society, founded by Hovhannes Tumanyan in Tiflis in 1899, that met in his attic apartment until 1908 and preceded the Caucasian Society of Armenian Writers.

Verner von Heidenstam

Verner von Heidenstam (1859–1940) was a Swedish poet and prose writer who led the literary reaction against naturalism in Sweden and received the 1916 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Vernon Lee

Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget (1856–1935), a British-born writer raised in France and Italy known for essays on aesthetics and supernatural stories.

Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge (1944–2024), American science fiction writer and San Diego State mathematics professor, won three Best Novel Hugos and coined the technological Singularity in his 1993 essay 'The Coming Technological Singularity.'

Veronica Franco

Veronica Franco (1546-1591), Venetian cortigiana onesta and poet, author of Terze rime (1575) and Lettere familiari a diversi (1580), member of Domenico Venier's circle, tried by the Inquisition in 1580, later a proto-feminist icon.

Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth (born 1988) is the #1 New York Times bestselling American author of the Divergent dystopian YA trilogy (over 32 million copies sold) and adult works Chosen Ones, Poster Girl, and When Among Crows; her alternate-universe Divergent novel The Sixth Faction publishes October 6, 2026.

Véronique Tadjo

Véronique Tadjo, born in Paris in 1955 and raised in Abidjan, is an Ivorian and French writer and academic known for writing about the Rwandan genocide and the 2014 Ebola epidemic.

Veysi

Veysi (Veysî, ويسى) was an Ottoman poet and prose writer, c. 1561–1628, celebrated for ornate inşa prose and the Siyer-i Veysî, the first original Prophetic biography in Ottoman Turkish.

Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984) was a Spanish poet of the Generation of 1927 who wrote in Madrid and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1977, the last Spanish poet to receive it.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) was a Spanish novelist and republican politician from Valencia whose war novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse became an international bestseller.

Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) was a Chilean poet born in Santiago who founded Creacionismo, the avant-garde movement treating the poem as a made object, and wrote Altazor.

Vicente Pérez Rosales

Vicente Pérez Rosales (1807–1886) was a Chilean businessman, diplomat, and writer who organized the German colonization of the Llanquihue region and wrote the memoir Recuerdos del pasado.

Vicente Riva Palacio

Vicente Riva Palacio (1832–1896) was a Mexican writer, historian, and general known for his colonial-era historical novels and for directing México a través de los siglos.

Victor Canning

Victor Canning (born Victor Cannings, 1911–1986), British novelist of 61 books: Mr Finchley comedies, Rex Carver thrillers, the Birdcage books, The Rainbird Pattern (CWA Silver Dagger, filmed as Hitchcock's Family Plot), and the Crimson Chalice Arthurian trilogy.

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo (1802–1885), French poet, novelist, and playwright, leader of French Romanticism, author of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, Académie française member, exile on Guernsey, buried in the Panthéon.