Recited a poem to Syria's president as a farm boy and was later jailed for his politics
A farmer's son who taught himself to read, he won a scholarship by reciting a poem to Syria's president, was later imprisoned for his politics, and…
Her first novel was rejected for years before she became the best-selling novelist of all time
A wartime hospital dispenser who learned about poisons on the job, she wrote her first detective novel on a dare from her sister, had it turned down…
Grew up in exile watching his poet father clean toilets, and has spent his life refusing to be quiet
The son of a disgraced poet, he spent his childhood in a labour camp region of Xinjiang, washed dishes in New York, and became the most prominent…
Written off and suicidal at 61, he came back to make Kagemusha and Ran
The director of Seven Samurai lost his backing, was fired from a Hollywood film and cut his wrists after a flop. Financed by admirers abroad, he made…
Born without arms and put into care, she became the artist whose pregnant body stood in Trafalgar Square
Raised in an institution after being born with no arms and short legs, she took a first-class degree in fine art, paints with her mouth and was…
Left Paris success to paint the poor of India and died at twenty-eight, days before her first big show
Feted in Paris at nineteen, she chose to go home to India and paint village women with an honesty no one had attempted, then died suddenly in Lahore…
Spent his last years living in his workshop, building a cathedral he knew he would never finish
A sickly child who missed school and studied plants instead, he graduated as either a madman or a genius, in his professor’s words, and devoted his…
Tortured in court to test her word, she went on to become the most successful woman painter of her age
Raped by her tutor at 17 and put through a humiliating public trial, she left Rome, became the first woman admitted to the Florentine academy and…
Fell silent for nearly eight years, then returned with a music so simple the censors did not know what to do
A Soviet Estonian composer censured for modernism and then for religion, he stopped composing for most of a decade, studied medieval chant, and…
Beaten for making clay figures as a child, she became a leading sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance
Barred from a summer school in France because she was Black, she fought back publicly, built a studio that taught a generation of Black artists, and…
Carved abstract sculpture in a Cornish yard while raising triplets and grieving a lost son
A Yorkshire engineer’s daughter who insisted on learning to carve stone directly, she worked through motherhood, war and the death of her son to…
Rejected by publishers, she printed Peter Rabbit herself and ended up saving a corner of the Lake District
A lonely Victorian girl who drew rabbits and studied fungi, she was turned down by publisher after publisher, printed Peter Rabbit at her own expense…
Too poor to finish university, he wrote The Famished Road and became the youngest Booker Prize winner
Forced to abandon university when the money ran out, he lived hand to mouth in London before writing The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize…
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…
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…
Gave up singing for ten years and was over fifty when the world finally heard the barefoot diva of Cape Verde
She sang morna in the sailors' bars of Mindelo for tips and drinks, quit for a decade when the work dried up, and became an international star in her…
Pasted labels on bottles in a rat-infested factory at 12 and kept the secret for the rest of his life
When his father was jailed for debt, he was pulled from school and sent to work in a blacking factory. The shame of it drove him to become the most…
Told literature could not be the business of a woman’s life, she wrote Jane Eyre anyway
A parson’s daughter from a windswept Yorkshire village who lost her mother and two sisters as a child, endured years as a governess and, after a book…
Drank herself out of music for a decade and came back at seventy-one to become a legend
A ranchera singer who wore trousers, smoked cigars and sang love songs to women without changing the pronouns, she vanished into alcoholism for years…
The only copy of his first novel sat ignored in a London typing agency for months
The father of modern African literature nearly lost Things Fall Apart before it was published, and spent his last two decades in a wheelchair after a…
Written off as mentally disabled at birth, he wrote and painted with the only limb he could control
Born with severe cerebral palsy into a Dublin family of thirteen surviving children, he could move only his left foot. With it he wrote the letter A…
A child prodigy who supported eight children by touring Europe for sixty years
Pushed onto the stage at nine by a domineering father, she fought him in court to marry Robert Schumann, then held her family together through his…
Mocked, broke and half blind, he painted the water lilies that fill two rooms in Paris
The word Impressionism was coined to ridicule him. He was so poor that he tried to drown himself, buried his young wife, and painted his last great…
