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Saint Yared was a 6th century poet and musician who is generally regarded as being the greatest ever of his ilk to come out of Ethiopia. He holds the honour of being the inventor of the sacred music tradition that is still practiced today within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He also devised his country’s system of musical notation. The Ethiopian chant known ...
Septimus Winner was a 19th century American poet and songwriter. He was an occasional performer and teacher of music and he also worked in the music publishing business. As well as his own name he used a number of pseudonyms for his work, including Apsley Street, Alice Hawthorne and Paul Stenton. He must have used the name Hawthorne because of his mother being ...
The Hebrew medieval poet known as Samuel ha-Nagid was an extremely influential man who lived in the part of southern Spain, which is now known as Andalusia, that was occupied by the Moors in the 11th century. Apart from being a well-known writer he was a philologist, politician and soldier who acted as patron to other poets and artists. History records him ...
The English poet Sarah Fyge Egerton was one of few female poets around at the time and, as evidenced from her output of writing, she was an outspoken young woman. She touched on controversial subjects such as religion and politics along with the relationships between married couples and the development of friendships. As a teenager she took exception to a misogynist piece of ...
Taneda Santoka was a Japanese haiku poet who specialised in free verse haiku during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He also translated works in French and Russian into Japanese. His birth name was Taneda Shoichi and he was born on the 3rd December 1882 in a small village on the southwestern tip of Honshu which is Japan’s main island. He had a ...
The story of this medieval poet and singer born in India during the 15th century is, understandably, shrouded in mystery and some say that his life spanned over 100 years. He composed songs in a relatively crude Hindi dialect called Braj Bhasha and historians claim that he was responsible for ensuring that this version of the Indian language passed into literary ...
Sebastian Brant, whose name is sometimes spelled Brandt, was a writer and humanist of the German medieval period who is quite well known for the satirical piece Ship of Fools, also called Das Narrenschieff. He was born sometime during 1457 in the French/German border city of Strasbourg. He had a fairly humble upbringing, his father was the keeper of an inn in the ...
Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was an American poet, essayist and short story writer who was closely associated with the 20th century American Naturalist literary movement. Robert Frost famously called her “saintly” and he was quoted as follows: “To a saint and a reformer like Sarah Cleghorn the great importance is not to get hold of both ends, but of the right end. ...
Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, born in the USA was a magazine editor and writer who achieved worldwide fame with her composition of one of the most famous children’s nursery rhymes ever, Mary Had a Little Lamb. She had a keen sense of public duty and has two major achievements to her name in that line. Her campaigning efforts brought about the Thanksgiving ...
Owen Seaman was an English poet, magazine editor, schoolmaster and barrister at London’s Inner Temple. At the outbreak of the First World War he was knighted for his services to literature, much of which had been of a light-hearted nature. He was born on the 18th September 1861 in the Midlands town of Shrewsbury. He studied at the prestigious School there and then ...
