Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
An Irish aid worker who drove Jewish children out of a French internment camp in the boot of her car
From a children's hospital in the Spanish Civil War to the Quaker relief office at Perpignan, she quietly removed children from Rivesaltes camp…
Petitioned a segregated school to attend night classes and became NASA's first Black woman engineer
Hired as a human computer in a segregated section, she had to ask the city for permission to attend classes at a white school to qualify as an…
Passed over for promotion by a man she had trained, she quit and started her own company at 45
After 25 years in direct sales, she was replaced by a man on twice her salary and retired to write a book. Her husband died a month before the launch…
Nursed her parents until thirty, then went to West Africa alone to collect fish and argue with missionaries
Self-taught from her father’s library, she paddled through the Ogooué rapids, climbed Mount Cameroon by an unclimbed route and defended African…
A farmer's daughter from Manipur who won six world boxing titles, one of them as a mother of twins
She hid her boxing from her parents until a newspaper gave her away, became world champion at 20, and came back after having twins to win more titles…
Went to a union meeting to report on it for her Tory father and ended up leading the women chainmakers
She founded the National Federation of Women Workers, forced Parliament to set minimum wages in the sweated trades and led the ten-week strike of…
The first Black woman to publish an account of her enslavement in Britain, and to petition Parliament
Sold away from her mother at twelve and worked for years in the salt ponds of Turks Island, she walked out of her owners' house in London in 1828 and…
Refused by the War Office, she paid her own way to the Crimea and nursed soldiers under fire
A Jamaican healer turned away when she volunteered for the Crimean War, she travelled there at her own expense, built a hostel near the front and…
Wrote Frankenstein at 18 after losing her first child, then outlived nearly everyone she loved
Her mother died giving birth to her, she eloped at 16, buried three children and her husband before she was 25, and in between invented one of the…
From the Dundee mills to the Nigerian forest, where she stopped the killing of twins
A mill girl from a Dundee slum who went to Calabar as a missionary, lived among the Okoyong people as one of them, rescued abandoned twin babies and…
Taught herself algebra from a fashion magazine and became the woman the word "scientist" was coined for
Her father feared study would damage her health and her first husband thought it pointless. Widowed at 27, she taught herself mathematics and became…
Lost her Indian status for marrying a white man and spent thirty years getting the law changed
Under Canada's Indian Act, a Mohawk woman who married a non-Indian lost her status, her home and the right to be buried with her family. She…
Doodled her way to the Fields Medal, the first woman to win it, and died at 40
A Tehran schoolgirl who was told she was no good at maths became one of the great geometers of her generation, working slowly on huge sheets of paper…
Solved a centuries-old packing problem in a dimension nobody could picture
A Ukrainian mathematician who solved the centuries-old problem of how to pack spheres most efficiently in eight and twenty-four dimensions, becoming…
The son of Korean immigrants in Japan who was told to hide his name and built SoftBank instead
Born to an ethnic Korean family in Japan at a time of open discrimination against Koreans, he adopted a Japanese name as a child, later studied in…
Turned physical embraces into a charity network reaching disaster survivors worldwide
A fisherwoman's daughter from Kerala known as "the hugging saint" for embracing millions of followers, she built her spiritual following into a large…
Charted the coast of Australia, was imprisoned for six years on the way home, and named the continent
A Lincolnshire surgeon’s son who circumnavigated Australia in a rotting ship, spent six years detained on Mauritius, and lived just long enough to…
The Black explorer who reached the North Pole with Peary and spent thirty years being forgotten
Orphaned young and sent to sea at twelve, he became the most skilled sledge driver and Inuit speaker on Peary’s expeditions, stood at the Pole in…
Silent for five years as a child, she became one of the great voices of American literature
After a childhood trauma she stopped speaking for almost five years. She went on to be a dancer, a singer, a civil rights organiser, and the author…
Led decades of protest against a dam project that displaced hundreds of thousands in India
A social worker who gave up an academic career to live among villagers facing eviction for a giant dam project, she founded the Narmada Bachao…
A grocer's son from Bengal who worked out how to read the temperature of a star
Expelled from school for a political protest and kept out of a hostel because of his caste, he produced an equation at 27 that let astronomers turn…
Arrested on stage with her whole audience, she sang her way back from exile before the junta fell
A folk singer from the north of Argentina whose songs became the voice of Latin America's poor, she was banned by the dictatorship, arrested…
A biologist by training, he became one of Mozambique's most celebrated novelists while still tracking wildlife
A working biologist who wrote fiction on the side, he built a body of novels reshaping Portuguese prose around Mozambican oral speech and became one…
A blacksmith's son with no schooling who read the books he was binding and discovered electromagnetism
Treated as a valet by the wife of the man who hired him, he became the greatest experimental scientist of his century, then refused a knighthood and…
