Writers Who Changed History

Meet the world's greatest writers - face to face.

This stunning visual celebration of the world’s most celebrated novelists, poets, and playwrights tells the fascinating stories of their lives and works.

Lavishly illustrated with portraits of each writer, alongside photographs of their homes and studies, and personal artefacts - along with pages from original manuscripts, first editions, and their correspondence - Writers Who Changed History offers a unique window into the personalities of each individual, and their key ideas, themes, and literary techniques.

Introduced with a stunning portrait of each featured writer, biographical entries trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired and influenced their work, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings that they created. Each entry explains how the person’s writing developed during their lifetime, and sets it in context, conveying a powerful sense of the place and the period of history in which they lived.

Covering a broad range of authors, poets, and playwrights from the Middle Ages to the present day, Writers Who Changed History provides a compelling, entertaining, and accessible glimpse of the lives and loves of each one.