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 ...
Sir Muhammad Iqbal, also known as Allama Iqbal, was a Pakistani poet and philosopher. This multi-talented man also trained at Lincoln’s Inn, London as a barrister and was much respected in academic circles. Named by the Pakistan government as a “national poet” he is widely acknowledged as being one of the driving forces behind the “Pakistan Movement”. Many literary critics and media outlooks ...
Ronald Ross was a multi-talented man whose, perhaps, minor achievements were in the field of literature. He was a poet, song writer and novelist but he is most famous as the British doctor who, while serving in India, discovered that the malarial parasite is carried by the mosquito. His pioneering, early-20th century work, was the forerunner to medical studies that would eventually ...
Robert Aytoun, whose name is sometimes spelled Ayton, was a Scottish poet whose panegyric, written in Latin to celebrate the accession to the English throne of King James VI, earned him considerable favour at court. He was knighted in 1612 and served as a private secretary to the royal households of James I and Charles I. He was born some time during the ...
Kingsley Amis was one of the great English writers of the 20th century. He was ranked 9th of the top fifty post-war British writers by The Times newspaper when they published the list in 2008. As well as being a poet, with an output of six separate volumes of poetry, he was also a literary critic. Additionally he wrote some twenty comic ...
Sacheverell Sitwell was the youngest of the famous trio of artists and writers known as “The Sitwells”, the other two being Sir Osbert Sitwell who was also a poet and journalist, and literary critic and poet Dame Edith Sitwell. Sacheverell, as well as being a poet, was a prominent music and art critic and was also an expert in baroque ...
Samuel Ferguson was a 19th century Irish poet, who was also a public servant and barrister who, for his work as Deputy Keeper of the Public Records in Ireland, received a knighthood in 1878. This post came after he had retired from the bar some eleven years earlier. Many critics regard him as the stand out Irish poet of his time and he was, almost ...
