Hester Pulter was a female Renaissance poet, deeply interested in modern science, politics and literature, yet her identity as a woman kept her both geographically and intellectually isolated and her poetry was left undiscovered in a library until it was discovered accidentally in 1996. Hester gives a rare female voice to the poetic language of scientific discovery, we urge you to give her a read!

Nigerian female author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a renowned public speaker as well as a novelist. Her main concerns as a writer are female and African American identity, and she repeatedly explores the extent of an individual’s autonomy in determining cultural identity. Check out her inspirational and resonant novels, 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and 'Americanah', as well as her various TED Talks, including 'The Danger of a Single Story' and 'We Should All Be Feminists'.

Read published author, Elisa’s engaging piece on why the deeply-philosophical, yet compelling writer, Iris Murdoch, deserves a new audience: “I discovered Iris Murdoch in my first year at Cambridge, where I was studying English at Pembroke College…this was 1999 and my best friend had just finished The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and passed it to me as I waved my goodbye before leaving.”

“While many authors make their name with a particular style – an emotional, first-person narrative or a detached, poetic musing on life – Smith’s strength lies in her ability to straddle different genres, hopping and jumping to inhabit different voices. Her two most recent works, Feel Free and Grand Union are very different. Feel Free is an essay collection, about topics from Justin Bieber to Brexit and climate change, while Grand Union is a collection of short stories. Yet, I would say they are my two favourite works by her.”

When one is an early learner of French, and trying to graduate from textbooks to real books, there are suggestions that appear again and again. Le Petit Prince is charming and readable, Tintin has an endless back catalogue, and L’Etranger by Albert Camus is every single teacher’s go-to. However, if you want to veer carefully off the beaten track, the Belgian author, Amélie Nothomb, is an excellent choice (you can also read her in translation).

Discover one of Latin America’s most popular authors, Isabelle Allende, in Lila’s blog on the genre of magical realism, ‘Writing as an act of hope’ and a form of female resistance in The House of Spirits.

A spotlight on Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian author who writes in English. Amy first discovered her work when completing her french dissertation on Haitian literature, and found her novels a fascinating insight into a history that was previously unknown - the parsley massacre, the continued rivalry between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This post spotlights a different country as well as an inspiring female author worth a voice.