Carrie Fisher was an American actress and writer. She is best known for playing Princess Leia in Star Wars. She has written a semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge, as well as two autobiographical novels Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic which deal with her struggles with addiction and bipolar disorder. Fisher was outspoken in her views …
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. She is best known for her novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and her inspirational 2012 TEDx talk entitled “We should all be feminists” which was adapted into a book-length essay in 2014. Adichie was born in …
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. She is best known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Her work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. Butler was born in 1956 …
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author. She is considered one of the pre-eminent writers of twentieth-century African-American literature and was closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama. At the age of three, her family moved to Eatonville Florida, one of the first incorporated black …
Fatema Mernissi was a Moroccan sociologist and one of the founders of Islamic feminism. She is best known for her focus on reconciling traditional Islam with progressive feminism. Mernissi was born in 1940 in Fes, Morocco. As a child, she, unlike her mother and grandmother before her, was able to gain an education. She attended …
Caroline Norton was an English feminist, social reformer, and author of the early and mid-nineteenth century. She was a major Victorian campaigner for women’s rights and was instrumental in the passing of the Custody of Infants Act 1839 and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Norton was born in 1808 in London. At the age of …
Beatrix Potter was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. She wrote and illustrated more than 20 children’s books featuring the animals Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Benjamin Bunny. Potter was born in 1866 in London. Her father Rupert had trained as a lawyer but devoted himself to art and photography, her mother Helen …
Audre Lorde described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. She was a pioneer of intersectional feminism and her work focused on confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in 1934 in New York City to West Indian parents. She grew up hearing her mother’s stories about the West …
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author. She is best known for her graphic novel Persepolis, which provide an insight into life in Iran during the Iranian Revolution of the early 80’s. Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran and grew up in Tehran. Her parents …
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer. She is best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is widely thought of as the first science fiction novel. Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 in Somers Town, London to Mary …