Famous Writers: Ranked by Popularity (Page 19 of 20) | Who Shares My BirthdayThe most famous writers in history, ranked by historical popularity: novelists, poets and playwrights with their birthdays and best-known works.A writer becomes notable when their words keep finding new readers. Many of the names on this list wrote books, poems or plays that are still taught in schools, translated into dozens of languages and adapted for stage and screen. Others shaped how people think about politics, faith or society.This list covers the novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and other authors in our database, from ancient poets to contemporary bestsellers. We rank them by historical popularity rather than by literary prizes, so the order shows whose work and lives the world still reads about most.Who is included: everyone in our database whose primary occupation matches this list. Each person must have an English Wikipedia article and a full date of birth recorded on Wikidata. A growing share of people also have an original profile, written to our editorial rules and marked with a Last reviewed date.Most famous writer: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Highest historical popularity score (HPI 93.2).Most common birth month: November. 93 of 973 were born in November.Living vs deceased: 134 / 839. 14% are still living.Most common nationality: American. 193 people, 20% of the list.Editor-written profiles: 307. 32% have a full original profile so far.901. Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005), American: Radical feminist who wrote Intercourse and campaigned with Catharine MacKinnon for civil-rights laws against pornography.902. Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), British: Clergyman and novelist who wrote the children's fantasy The Water-Babies and the adventure Westward Ho!.903. Robert Fisk (1946–2020), British: Journalist who reported on the Middle East for decades, notably for The Independent, and wrote The Great War for Civilisation.904. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), American: Harlem Renaissance writer whose novel Their Eyes Were Watching God became a landmark of African American literature.905. Donna Tartt (1963), American: Novelist whose debut The Secret History became a cult hit and whose The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.906. Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), American: Educator who founded the Tuskegee Institute and led Black America as a leading spokesman, with his autobiography Up from Slavery.907. Charles Lamb (1775–1834), British: Essayist who wrote Essays of Elia and, with his sister Mary, retold Shakespeare's plays for children.908. Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), American: Children's author and illustrator whose picture book Where the Wild Things Are became one of the best-loved of the twentieth century.909. Ravindra Prabhat (1969), Indian: Hindi writer who compiled a large reference work on Hindi blogging and wrote the novel Prempath.910. Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), American: Modernist poet of Harmonium and The Auroras of Autumn who spent his working life as an insurance executive in Hartford.911. Iain Banks (1954–2013), British: Scottish novelist who wrote the controversial debut "The Wasp Factory" and, as Iain M. Banks, the science fiction Culture series.912. Tariq Ali (1943), Pakistani: Writer and campaigner of the 1960s New Left and a long-time editor of New Left Review.913. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977), Nigerian: Wrote the novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, and the essay We Should All Be Feminists.914. William Cowper (1731–1800), British: Poet and hymn writer who wrote The Task and the hymn God Moves in a Mysterious Way, celebrating ordinary English country life.915. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), American: Pulitzer Prize-winning lyric poet whose collection The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver made her a celebrated voice of the Jazz Age.916. Victor Pelevin (1962), Russian: Wrote post-Soviet satirical novels including Generation P and Chapayev and Void.917. Taslima Nasrin (1962), Bangladeshi: Writer and physician whose novel Lajja and criticism of religious oppression of women led to exile from Bangladesh.918. Oksana Zabuzhko (1960), Ukraine: Author of the novel Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, a landmark of post-Soviet Ukrainian literature.919. Hilary Mantel (1952–2022), British: Won the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, her novels about Thomas Cromwell.920. Seán O'Casey (1880–1964), Irish: Dramatist whose Dublin Trilogy, including The Plough and the Stars, put the lives of the city's working poor on stage.921. Henry Adams (1838–1918), American: Historian and author of The Education of Henry Adams, from the famous Adams family.922. Arundhati Roy (1961), Indian: Won the 1997 Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, set in Kerala.923. Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), American: Wrote Invisible Man, a landmark novel of Black American identity that won the 1953 National Book Award.924. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), American: Orator nicknamed the Great Agnostic who toured America lecturing on freethought.925. Sofi Oksanen (1977), Finn: Finnish-Estonian-themed novelist whose play and novel Purge, about Soviet-occupied Estonia, won major prizes and wide international acclaim.926. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), American: Journalist who exposed lynching in the American South and helped found the NAACP.927. Marilynne Robinson (1943), American: Novelist whose Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and began a four-book series.928. Philip Reeve (1966), British: Children's author who created the Mortal Engines series about traction cities and won the Carnegie Medal for Here Lies Arthur.929. Joss Whedon (1964), American: Creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and director of The Avengers.930. Naomi Klein (1970), Canadian: Author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine who writes on capitalism and climate change.931. Alan Paton (1903–1988), South African: Wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, the 1948 novel that brought South Africa's racial divisions to a worldwide readership.932. Elbert Green Hubbard (1856–1915), American: Founder of the Roycroft arts-and-crafts community, he wrote the widely reprinted essay "A Message to Garcia".933. Aaron Sorkin (1961), American: Writer of The West Wing and The Social Network, which won him an Oscar.934. Erica Jong (1942), American: Her novel Fear of Flying brought frank female sexuality into mainstream fiction and became a landmark of second-wave feminism.935. Amitav Ghosh (1956), Indian: Novelist behind the Ibis trilogy, which opens with Sea of Poppies and centres on the nineteenth-century opium trade.936. Yann Martel (1963), Canadian: Novelist who won the Booker Prize for Life of Pi, the story of a boy stranded at sea with a tiger.937. Serhiy Zhadan (1974), Ukraine: Ukrainian poet and novelist who fronts the band Zhadan i Sobaky and wrote the novel Voroshilovgrad.938. Christopher Paolini (1983), American: Wrote the fantasy novel Eragon while still a teenager, launching the Inheritance Cycle.939. Jhumpa Lahiri (1967), British: Author of the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.940. Fareed Zakaria (1964), American: CNN host of Fareed Zakaria GPS and Washington Post columnist on world affairs.941. Waleed Al-Husseini (1989), Palestinian: Founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France and became a prominent critic of religion after being imprisoned in the Palestinian territories.942. Ben Okri (1959), Nigerian: Novelist who won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road, a work blending African spirit-world myth with social realism.943. Zadie Smith (1975), British: Novelist whose debut White Teeth, a multicultural story of north London families, was an instant bestseller and prizewinner.944. Ann Coulter (1961), American: Conservative commentator and syndicated columnist whose books and cable news appearances made her a combative critic of the Clinton administration.945. Cory Doctorow (1971), Canadian: Science fiction writer and co-editor of Boing Boing who campaigns for copyright reform and releases his books under Creative Commons licences.946. Kiran Desai (1971), Indian: Novelist whose book The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker Prize, exploring migration and displacement between India and the West.947. Aravind Adiga (1974), Indian: Writer whose debut novel The White Tiger, a dark portrait of class in modern India, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.948. William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English: Playwright whose works, including Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, made him the towering figure of English literature.949. Walter Scott (1771–1832), Scottish: Popularised the historical novel through the Waverley series, including Ivanhoe and Rob Roy, and shaped the image of Scotland.950. Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), British: Philologist who edited the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East and helped establish the academic study of comparative religion.How we rank and selectRanking: people are ordered by their Historical Popularity Index (HPI) from Pantheon. HPI combines how many Wikipedia language editions have an article about a person, how many page views those articles get, how evenly the views are spread across languages and how long ago the person lived. People Pantheon does not yet cover are listed after them, ordered by our own popularity score (the number of Wikipedia language editions with an article about them).Membership: each person appears in one occupation list only, based on their primary occupation as classified by Pantheon (for example, a queen who wrote poetry is listed as royalty, not as a writer). Kings, queens, emperors, sultans and royal consorts are not listed as politicians or writers: anyone who held a monarch's office on Wikidata, and never served as a president or head of government, counts as royalty. For the few people Pantheon does not cover, we use the primary field recorded in our database.One-line summaries: each summary is an original line written for this site with AI assistance under our editorial rules, then checked against the Wikipedia introduction so no wording is copied.Statistics: every figure on this page is calculated live from our database each time the page loads, so it changes as we add people.Last reviewed: October 2026Sources: Pantheon: Historical Popularity Index (HPI) rankings, Wikidata: birth dates, death dates and occupations, Wikipedia: biographies behind our summaries and popularity scores. Who Shares My Birthday.

Charles Kingsley

Zora Neale Hurston

Booker T. Washington

Ravindra Prabhat

Wallace Stevens

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oksana Zabuzhko

Robert Green Ingersoll

Marilynne Robinson

Elbert Green Hubbard

Christopher Paolini

Waleed Al-Husseini

William Shakespeare

Friedrich Max Müller

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Famous Writers

The best-known novelists, poets and playwrights in our archive, ranked by historical popularity.

974 writers in our database, ranked by historical popularity. Page 19 of 20.

Most famous writer

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Highest historical popularity score (HPI 93.2)

Most common birth month

November

93 of 974 were born in November

Living vs deceased

135 / 839

14% are still living

Most common nationality

American

194 people, 20% of the list

Editor-written profiles

307

32% have a full original profile so far

The ranked list (from #901)

How we rank and select

Ranking: people are ordered by their Historical Popularity Index (HPI) from Pantheon. HPI combines how many Wikipedia language editions have an article about a person, how many page views those articles get, how evenly the views are spread across languages and how long ago the person lived. People Pantheon does not yet cover are listed after them, ordered by our own popularity score (the number of Wikipedia language editions with an article about them).
Membership: each person appears in one occupation list only, based on their primary occupation as classified by Pantheon (for example, a queen who wrote poetry is listed as royalty, not as a writer). Kings, queens, emperors, sultans and royal consorts are not listed as politicians or writers: anyone who held a monarch's office on Wikidata, and never served as a president or head of government, counts as royalty. For the few people Pantheon does not cover, we use the primary field recorded in our database.
One-line summaries: each summary is an original line written for this site with AI assistance under our editorial rules, then checked against the Wikipedia introduction so no wording is copied.
Statistics: every figure on this page is calculated live from our database each time the page loads, so it changes as we add people.

Further reading

Reviewed by the Who Shares My Birthday editorial team.

Last reviewed: October 2026

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