Writers and literary biographies

Jean de La Bruyère

Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696) was a French essayist and moralist, author of Les Caractères (1688), a collection of maxims and portraits of his century.

Jean de La Fontaine

Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) was a French poet and fabulist whose 239 verse fables, drawn from Aesop, place him in the first rank of French literature.

Jean de Meun

Jean de Meun (c. 1240 – c. 1305) was a French poet who completed the Roman de la Rose, adding about 17,000 lines to Guillaume de Lorris's allegory.

Jean Fanchette (1932–1992) was a Mauritian-born French-language poet, psychoanalyst, and editor who founded the Paris review Two Cities and won the Académie française's prix de la Langue française in 1976.

Jean Giono

Jean Giono (1895–1970) was a French novelist and pacifist from Manosque in Provence, known for the Pan trilogy, the Hussard cycle, and "The Man Who Planted Trees."

Jean Guéhenno

Jean Guéhenno (1890–1978) was a French writer, teacher, and education inspector best remembered for Journal des années noires, his secret diary of the German occupation of France.

Jean M. Auel

Jean M. Auel, born 1936, American author of the Earth's Children prehistoric series beginning with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980); six volumes, over 45 million copies sold, ending with The Land of Painted Caves (2011).

Jean Malonga

Jean Malonga (1907–1985) was a Congolese writer and politician, regarded as the founder of modern Congolese literature; his novel Cœur d'Aryenne is considered the first Congolese novel.

Jean Métellus

Jean Métellus (1937–2014) was a Haitian poet, novelist, playwright, and neurologist who left Haiti in 1959 under the Duvalier dictatorship and spent his life in exile in France.

Jean Paul

Jean Paul was the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), a German novelist known for humorous works such as Hesperus, Siebenkäs, and Titan.

Jean Pliya

Jean Pliya (1931–2015) was a Beninese writer of French expression and geographer by training, a founding figure of Beninese theater whose plays Kondo le requin and La Secrétaire particulière dominated the stage for two decades.

Jean Raspail

Jean Raspail (Jean Paul Raspail, 5 July 1925 – 13 June 2020), French novelist, journalist, and explorer; author of Le Camp des saints (1973) and Moi, Antoine de Tounens; Académie française Grand Prix du Roman 1981.

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys (Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams), Dominican-born modernist novelist (1890 or 1894–1979), author of Quartet, Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight, and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), the Jane Eyre prequel that restored her fame.

Jean Schlumberger (writer)

Jean Schlumberger (1877–1968) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright who co-founded La Nouvelle Revue Française with André Gide in 1908 and ran it from 1909 to 1914.

Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford (1915–1979) was an American novelist and short story writer who won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her Collected Stories and wrote the novels Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion.

Jean Starobinski

Jean Starobinski (1920–2019) was a Swiss literary critic, historian of ideas, and psychiatrist of the Geneva School, known for his studies of Montaigne, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Enlightenment.

Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard

Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard (1938–2009) was a Congolese poet, novelist, and longtime government minister of the Republic of the Congo, regarded as one of the most significant poets of French-speaking Africa.

Jean-Claude Charles

Jean-Claude Charles (1949–2008) was a Haitian poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist who spent his career in exile and coined the term enracinerrance for permanent displacement.

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901 or 1903 – 1937) was a Malagasy poet, novelist, and translator, regarded as the first modern poet of Madagascar, best known for Presque-Songes and Traduit de la nuit.

Jean-Luc Raharimanana

Jean-Luc Raharimanana (born 1967) is a Malagasy writer and poet based in Paris whose work, notably the novel Nour, 1947, confronts the 1947 Malagasy insurrection.

Jean-Marie Adiaffi

Jean-Marie Adiaffi (full name Jean-Marie Adé Adiaffi, 1941–1999) was an Ivorian novelist, poet, and screenwriter whose novel La carte d'identité won the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire.

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson (born 1959, Manchester) is an English novelist and author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Whitbread first-novel winner, also known for The Passion, Written on the Body, and Frankissstein.

Jeannette Armstrong

Jeannette Armstrong, born 1948, is a Syilx (Okanagan) writer and educator from British Columbia whose 1985 novel Slash was the first published by a First Nations woman in Canada.

Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls (born 1960, Phoenix, Arizona) is an American author and journalist, former E! and New York magazine gossip columnist, best known for the bestselling memoir The Glass Castle (2005) and the novels Half Broke Horses, The Silver Star, and Hang the Moon.

Jed MacKay

Jed MacKay is a Canadian comic book writer from rural Prince Edward Island, known for Marvel runs on Moon Knight, Black Cat, Avengers (2023), X-Men (2024), and the Blood Hunt and Age of Revelation events.

Jeelani Bano

Jeelani Bano (جیلانی بانو, 1936–2026) was an Indian Urdu fiction writer and novelist from Hyderabad, best known for Aiwan-e-Ghazal and awarded the Padma Shri in 2001.

Jeet Thayil

Jeet Thayil (born 1959) is an Indian novelist, poet, and musician whose debut novel Narcopolis (2012) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the DSC Prize.

Jeff Kinney

Jeff Kinney (born 1971, Maryland) is the American author-illustrator of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, creator of Poptropica, and owner of the bookstore An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts; over 300 million copies in print.

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an American New Weird author of the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, Absolution), the Nebula and Shirley Jackson-winning Annihilation adapted by Alex Garland in 2018; also the Borne trilogy and Ambergris cycle.