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.
Refused by every flying school in America, she learned French and went to France to earn her licence
A sharecropper’s daughter and Chicago manicurist who became the first Black woman and first Native American woman to hold a pilot’s licence, and…
Turned traditional Ethiopian shoemaking skills into a global footwear brand rooted in her neighbourhood
Growing up in a poor district of Addis Ababa where recycled tyre sandals were a local tradition, she founded soleRebels in 2005, building a shoe…
A single mother secretary who mixed correction fluid in her kitchen blender to hide her typing mistakes
Working as a secretary to support herself and her young son, she invented a quick-drying correction fluid at her kitchen table to cover typing…
Survived the abuse she later built a network of shelters to stop happening to others
Orphaned young and sexually abused as a child in Zimbabwe, she became a teacher and founded the Girl Child Network, building shelters and clubs that…
The first women's Olympic 100m champion, presumed dead after a plane crash, who came back to win again
Spotted running for a train, she won Olympic gold at 16 in only her fourth race. Three years later a plane crash left her in a coma and barely able…
An accountant who painted on the side, he was the first Indian artist to paint gay life openly
Trained and working as a chartered accountant, he taught himself painting on the side before turning to frank, unsentimental depictions of ordinary…
Born into slavery, he began to draw at about eighty-five on a Montgomery pavement and made 1,200 pictures
A former slave and sharecropper who ended up homeless in Montgomery, Alabama, he started drawing on scraps of cardboard in his mid-eighties and, in…
Won 39 Grand Slam titles and fought for women to be paid the same as men
One of the greatest tennis players of any era, she founded the women's tour, beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, and lost her sponsors when…
Made a career of the one job in India nobody wanted to talk about: toilets
An Indian sociologist who designed a cheap, safe toilet that freed hundreds of thousands of manual scavengers from cleaning human waste by hand, and…
Given months to live with cancer, he won the Grand National on a horse that had nearly been put down
A jump jockey diagnosed with cancer in 1979 and put through brutal chemotherapy, he set himself the target of riding Aldaniti, a horse recovering…
Turned a small Lancashire town into the world's first Fairtrade town and never moved away
A former factory worker in Garstang, Lancashire, he led a local campaign that made his small town the world's first officially recognised Fairtrade…
A minister who went door to door in Notting Hill slums and founded Shelter
Shaken by the housing conditions he found in west London in the 1960s, he set up the Notting Hill Housing Trust in 1963 to buy and let decent homes,…
The Aboriginal navigator and diplomat who sailed right around Australia before it had that name
A Kuringgai man from the Broken Bay area, he sailed with Matthew Flinders around Australia, using his diplomacy to defuse encounters between the crew…
Trained illiterate grandmothers to become solar engineers in a village college with no exams
An Indian graduate who gave up a conventional career to live among labourers in rural Rajasthan, founding Barefoot College, which trains illiterate…
Taught herself to read jungle life so she could teach forest children to read at all
An Indonesian anthropologist who moved into the rainforest to live among the nomadic Orang Rimba people, building a system of portable, culturally…
Noticed the sea was too blue to be explained by reflected sky, and won a Nobel Prize finding out why
A civil servant who did physics in his spare time before a simple observation about the colour of the sea led him to discover how light scatters when…
Walked 100 laps of his garden at 99 and raised £38 million for the NHS
A retired army officer with a walking frame set out to raise £1,000 for NHS charities during the first Covid lockdown. Britain gave him 38,000 times…
Working from a railway carriage, he found a parasite, its insect carrier and a new disease, all by himself
Sent to a remote town in Minas Gerais to control malaria, a young Brazilian doctor described an entirely new disease from start to finish, a feat…
Said mosquitoes carried yellow fever in 1881, and was laughed at for twenty years
A Havana doctor with a stammer who presented a correct theory to an international conference, was ignored, and kept publishing until an American…
The son of a Lebanese immigrant shopkeeper who built Mexico's largest business empire from telecoms
Raised by a Lebanese immigrant father who taught him to keep meticulous financial records from childhood, he built a construction and trading…
Painted for more than sixty years without selling a single work and had her first sale at eighty-nine
A Cuban painter of clean, hard-edged abstractions who was told by a New York dealer that she would not show a woman, she kept painting in obscurity…
One of the first women to design video games, she wrote River Raid and retired at 35 on the proceeds
An engineering graduate hired by Atari in 1978 when almost no women wrote games, she was told she could do colour matching for cosmetics. At…
Raised as a household drudge, she became the first woman paid to do science
Childhood typhus stunted her growth and her mother trained her as a servant. Brought to England by her brother, she discovered eight comets and…
Won World gold at 18 and then spent years fighting to be allowed to run as herself
A teenager from Limpopo who ran an astonishing 800 metres at the 2009 World Championships, only to be subjected to sex verification testing and years…
