Ggy

• Man'yoshu


  The Collection of a Myriad Leaves, the first and longest of Japan's poetry anthologies, written by Otomo no Yakamochi
• Murasaki Shikibu


  • A woman who wrote The Tale of Genji, thought by many to be the 1st novel in the history of world literature
  • Genji is Murasaki Shikibu's ideal of manhood
• The Tale of Genji


  Covers the life span of the brilliant Prince Genji and his many romances, Genji is Murasaki Shikibu's ideal of manhood (gentle, poetic, stunningly handsome, and above all, a tender lover)
• The Pillow Book


  A genre-bending miscellany of short, largely unrelated pieces, which fall into three main categories: narratives (mostly events Sei experienced during her time at court); thoughts and opinions on various matters
• The Tale of Heike


  An epic that depicts the rise and fall of the Taira with the spotlight on their wars with the Minamoto Clan (Genji), deeply rooted in Buddhist ethics and filled with sorrow from those who perished
• Matsuo Basho


  • The great haiku poet who perfected a new condensed poetic form of 17 syllables (5-7-5) called haiku
• Kawabata Yasunari


  • The first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Rabindranath Tagore


  • The first Asian and first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote the Gitanjali (Song of Offerings)
• Gitanjali (Song of Offering)


  Tagore's English prose translations of religious poems from several of his Bengali verse collections, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1913
• Mahabharata


  The longest poem in history with about 100,000 couplets, traditionally ascribed to an Indian sage named Vyasa, Hindus regard the epic as both a text about dharma (Hindu moral law) and a history
• Shakuntala


  An Indian mythical play, the first of the 18 parts of Indian epic Mahabharata, with the central teaching of "Karma" revealed itself when Dusyanta failed to recognize Shakuntala as his wife
• Ramayana


  An Indian epic in Sanskrit, shorter than the Mahabharata, with some 24,000 couplets, written by Valmiki
• Panchatantra


  A collection of Indian animal fables, originally written in Sanskrit similar to those of Aesop's fables, attributed to Vishnusharman, a learned Brahmin, a mixture of prose and verse
• Rubaiyat


  A collection between two hundred and six hundred quatrains written in Persian language by Omar Khayyam
• Mohammad Taqi Bahar


  • Known as the "King of Poets", a poet, scholar, politician, journalist, historian and professor of literature, his poems deal with social and political situation of Iran
• Nima Yushij


  • A contemporary Persian poet famous for his style of poetry which he popularized called "she'r-e nimaa'i" (new poetry), the Father of Modern Persian Poetry
• Chinua Achebe


  • One of Nigeria's greatest novelists, unhappy with books about Africa written by British authors such as Joseph Conrad and John Buchan because he felt the descriptions of African people were inaccurate and insulting
• Things Fall Apart

  Considered as the best known African novel of the 20th century, deals with emergent Africa, where native communities, like Achebe's Igbo community, came in contact with white missionaries and its colonizers
• Wole Soyinka


  • Nigerian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 becoming the first black African to receive such award, wrote The Telephone Conversation, a poem about a telephone conversation between an African man and a white woman
• The Telephone Conversation


  A poem about a telephone conversation between an African man and a white woman about the rent but it became a conversation of ignorance or deliberate discrimination
• Leopold Senghor


  • Senegalese poet, writer, and first president of Senegal, wrote poems of resistance in French and nonfiction works includes numerous volumes on politics, philosophy, sociology and linguistics, main proponent of the NEGRITUDE movement
• Negritude Movement


  Promotes distinctly African cultural values and aesthetics, in opposition to the influence of French colonialism and European exploitation, literally means "blackness" that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris