Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was born in Lucca into a family of musicians and composers. His operas, which include Tosca, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the international repertory.

James Joyce

Born in Dublin, James Joyce (1882–1941) spent most of his life abroad, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. His writings, however, mainly centre on Dublin – most famously Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He pioneered and perfected avant-garde prose techniques that saw him rise to the rank of one of Europe’s foremost Modernists.

Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner (1813–83) was a composer who drew inspiration from Christian and Nordic mythology, as well as the philosophy of Schopenhauer, to pioneer dramatically new forms of music. His concept of the “Total Artwork” led to the construction of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, an opera house he designed specifically for productions of his own operas. He also wrote widely on music and art. His operas include Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the four parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, to strict Calvinist parents, Robert Louis Stevenson was a famous Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer. His ill health meant that he spent the latter part of his life voyaging the world, in an attempt to find a climate that suited his health, and this contributed to the exoticism of much of his work. He finally settled in Samoa, and died in 1899. Revered during his lifetime, and often harshly underrated since his death, Robert Louis Stevenson is today recognized as one of the the great writers of the nineteenth century, having influenced authors such as Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.

Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, is one of the foremost Romantic novelists. His masterpieces include The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Jane Hawking

Dr Jane Hawking, Stephen Hawking’s wife for over twenty-five years, is a writer, teacher and public speaker. Her memoir Travelling to Infinity, which became an Oscar-winning movie in 2015 under the title The Theory of Everything, was a number-one bestseller in the UK. It was followed by the novels Cry to Dream Again and Silent Music, the first two volumes in the Immortal Souls series.

Read an interview with Jane Hawking here

Virginia Woolf

The most famous member of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was a novelist, essayist and critic. Her writing established her as one of Modernism’s leading exponents, as well as a pioneering feminist. Her most famous works include To the Lighthouse, Orlando and Mrs Dalloway.

Sadeq Hedayat

Sadeq Hedayat was born in Tehran in 1903, of an aristocratic family, and spent most of his life there. In 1951, during a stay in Paris, Hedayat committed suicide. Recognized as the outstanding Persian writer of the 20th century, Hedayat is generally credited with having brought his country’s language and literature into the mainstream of contemporary writing.

Kenneth Grahame

A British writer most famous for The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932) worked at the Bank of England before retiring due to ill health. Grahame also wrote The Reluctant Dragon – which, like The Wind in the Willows, was adapted as a Disney film.

Sándor Márai

Sándor Márai (1900–89) was a Hungarian novelist, journalist and poet who lived in exile for the last fifty years of his life and is now considered one of his country’s major twentieth-century writers.