Eckhart Tolle

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy (born 1961) is an Indian author and activist whose debut novel *The God of Small Things* (1997) won the Booker Prize and sold more than eight million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling novels ever by a non-expatriate Indian author. Born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, Roy trained as an architect before writing her debut. After its success, she turned primarily to political essays — opposing nuclear testing, the Narmada Dam displacement, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq — collected in *The Algebra of Infinite Justice* (2002) and *Listening to Grasshoppers* (2009). Her second novel, *The Ministry of Utmost Happiness* (2017), arrived twenty years after her first. She remains one of India's most fearless public intellectuals.

Mo Yan

Mo Yan (born 1955) is a Chinese author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, cited for his "hallucinatory realism" that "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." Born Guan Moye in Gaomi, Shandong — a rural area that becomes the setting of much of his fiction — he left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in the fields, then served in the People's Liberation Army. His international reputation was established by *Red Sorghum* (1987), a visceral novel of wartime Shandong that was adapted into a Zhang Yimou film. His subsequent novels — *The Republic of Wine* (1992), *Big Breasts and Wide Hips* (1995), and *Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out* (2006) — blend Chinese folklore, Rabelaisian excess, and political critique. The Nobel Prize generated controversy because of his silence on the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, but he remains the most internationally recognized Chinese author.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose seven-volume autobiography, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), transformed American literature. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, she endured a childhood marked by racial segregation, sexual trauma, and years of voluntary muteness. She became a dancer, singer, actress, journalist, playwright, and eventually one of the most celebrated poets in American history. In 1993 she delivered her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Her work is inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement — she was a close friend and collaborator of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi (born 1945 in Rangoon, Burma) is a Burmese politician, diplomat, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1991). The daughter of Burma's independence hero General Aung San, she returned to Burma in 1988 during the pro-democracy uprising and became its symbol. She was placed under house arrest by the military junta for most of the following two decades — spending approximately 15 of 21 years (1989–2010) confined to her Rangoon home — while declining to leave to be with her dying husband in England. She led her party to a landslide election victory in 2015. Her reputation has been complicated by her silence on the Rohingya genocide during her time in government (2016–2021). She was again detained following the 2021 military coup.