20th-century essayists

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature

Samuel Beckett

Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator

Ronald Blythe

British writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village , an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s

J. G. Ballard

English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World . In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories , such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition . In the mid-1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash , a story about car crash fetishism, and High-Rise , a depiction of a luxury apartment building’s descent into violent chaos

W. N. P. Barbellion

Nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings , an English diarist who was responsible for The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as the dominant figure of modern African literature