Writers and literary biographies

Herman Gorter

Herman Gorter (1864–1927) was a Dutch poet and Marxist theorist of the Tachtigers, best known for the epic poem Mei (1889) and his 1920 open letter opposing Lenin.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891), American novelist of Moby-Dick, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, and Billy Budd; whaling sailor turned author whose work sold poorly in life and was revived after 1919.

Herman Teirlinck (1879–1967) was a Flemish novelist, poet, playwright, and theater reformer, considered one of the best modern Flemish writers and the first laureate of the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren in 1956.

Herman Wildenvey

Herman Wildenvey (1885–1959), born Herman Theodor Portaas, was a Norwegian lyric poet who brought a new colloquial voice to Norwegian poetry from his debut in 1907.

Herman Wouk

Herman Wouk (1915–2019), American novelist of The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance; Pulitzer Prize 1952, Bronx-born, wrote into his 100th year.

Hermann Bahr

Hermann Bahr (1863–1934) was an Austrian writer, playwright, director, and theater and literary critic who served as one of the chief spokesmen and organizers of Viennese modernism around 1900.

Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch (1886–1951) was an Austrian Jewish novelist and essayist who wrote The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil and fled to America in 1938.

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), German-born Swiss writer of Demian, Siddhartha, Der Steppenwolf, and Das Glasperlenspiel; Nobel Prize in Literature 1946; over 150 million books sold in more than 70 languages.

Hermann Kesten

Hermann Kesten (1900–1996) was a German novelist and editor of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement who, in exile from the Nazis, published and rescued persecuted German-language writers.

Hermann Lenz

Hermann Lenz (1913–1998) was a German writer known for a nine-volume autobiographical novel cycle around his alter ego Eugen Rapp; he won the 1978 Georg Büchner Prize.

Hermann Löns

Hermann Löns (1866–1914) was a German journalist and writer known for hunting and nature sketches set in the Lüneburg Heath and for his bestselling novel Der Wehrwolf.

Hermann Stehr

Hermann Stehr (1864–1940) was a German novelist and short-story writer from Habelschwerdt, Silesia, whose religious-mystical fiction about Silesian peasants culminated in Der Heiligenhof (1918).

Hermogenes of Tarsus

Hermogenes of Tarsus, a Greek rhetorician born around 160 CE in Cilicia, wrote On Staseis and On Ideas of Style, treatises that shaped Byzantine and Renaissance rhetoric.

Hernán Ronsino

Hernán Ronsino is an Argentine novelist and sociologist, born in 1975 in Chivilcoy, best known for his Pampas trilogy and the acclaimed crime novel Glaxo.

Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc

Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc, also written Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, was a Nahua nobleman of Mexico-Tenochtitlan who wrote two chronicles of the Mexica past around 1600.

Herta Müller

Herta Müller, born 1953 in the Banat, Romania, is a German-Romanian novelist who emigrated to West Germany in 1987 and won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature for works on deportation and surveillance under dictatorship.

Hesiod (Ἡσίοδος)

Hesiod (Ἡσίοδος), early Greek epic poet of Ascra in Boeotia, around 700–650 BCE, author of the Theogony and Works and Days, the earliest systematic Greek accounts of the gods' origins and of moral and practical instruction.

Heşt Behişt

Heşt Behişt (Tezkire-i Sehî) is the first biographical dictionary of poets in Ottoman Turkish, completed by Sehî Bey in 1538 and presented to Sultan Süleyman.

Hideo Furukawa

Hideo Furukawa (古川日出男, born 1966) is a Japanese novelist from Fukushima Prefecture known for experimental, musically inflected prose and award-winning retellings of history and classical texts.

Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), Franco-English writer, historian, and Catholic polemicist; Liberal MP for Salford 1906-1910, author of about 150 books including The Servile State, and half of the 'Chesterbelloc' with G. K. Chesterton.

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), British novelist, first woman and first British writer to win the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012); author of the 2,000-plus-page Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Hilda Hilst

Hilda Hilst, full name Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst (1930–2004), was a Brazilian poet, playwright, and experimental fiction writer who won most of Brazil's major literary prizes.

Hilmi Yavuz

Hilmi Yavuz (born 14 April 1936) is a Turkish poet, essayist, and lecturer whose modern verse brings classical Ottoman Divan poetry and Sufi thought into Turkish.

Hipólito José da Costa

Hipólito José da Costa, also known as Hipólito da Costa, was a journalist and diplomat who founded the Correio Braziliense in London, recognized as the patron of Brazilian journalism.

Hiren Bhattacharyya

Hiren Bhattacharyya (হীৰেন ভট্টাচাৰ্য; 1932–2012) was an Indian Assamese poet known as the Poet of Love and Sunshine, who won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992.

Hiren Gohain

Hiren Gohain (হীৰেন গোহাঁই; born 1939 in Golaghat, Assam) is an Assamese literary critic, professor of English, and public intellectual who won the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award.

Hiromi Kawakami

Hiromi Kawakami (川上弘美, born 1958) is a Japanese novelist whose stories place fantastic creatures in ordinary daily life. Her novel Sensei no Kaban won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001.

Hiroshi Noma

Hiroshi Noma (野間宏, 1915–1991) was a Japanese novelist of the first postwar generation, best known for the army novel Zone of Emptiness, which won the 1952 Mainichi Prize.

Hirotsu Kazuo

Hirotsu Kazuo (広津和郎, 1891–1968) was a Japanese novelist and critic from Tokyo, son of novelist Hirotsu Ryuro, known for The Neurotic Age and criticism that helped exonerate the Matsukawa trial defendants.