Lost the use of two fingers in a caravan fire and reinvented the guitar with the ones he had left
An illiterate Romani teenager already famous in the dance halls of Paris, he was burned so badly at 18 that doctors wanted to amputate his leg. He…
Waited on the landing at night with a packed suitcase so his family would not see him arrested
Denounced by Stalin's newspaper at 29 and again by the Party at 41, he lived in fear of the knock at the door and wrote fifteen symphonies and…
Left lame by polio, she walked the Depression’s breadlines and gave the era its face
Polio at seven left her with a lifelong limp, and her father abandoned the family. She turned a portrait business into a decade of documenting the…
Found a sack of discarded bottle tops in his fifties and turned rubbish into shimmering cloth
A sculptor who taught at a Nigerian university for decades and worked in wood and clay, he began stitching thousands of flattened liquor-bottle caps…
Prosecuted in Turkey for insulting Turkishness, she kept writing about the country's silenced histories
Raised by a single mother and grandmother after her parents divorced, she became one of Turkey's bestselling novelists, faced prosecution over a…
A homeless teenager who went on stage to dance, sang instead and won
Orphaned, sent to a reform school and living rough in Harlem at 17, she entered an amateur night at the Apollo, changed her mind about dancing at the…
Learned to paint her mother's walls at ten and was first shown to the wider world at fifty-four
An Ndebele woman who painted house walls with chicken-feather brushes in rural Mpumalanga for decades, she was invited to Paris at 54 and went on to…
Began painting in her thirties, was ignored for fifty years and became an art-world star at eighty-seven
A philosophy teacher and poet who began painting in her thirties as a way of refusing to write in the language of colonisers, she was over 85 when a…
Profoundly deaf since 12, she became the world’s first full-time solo percussionist
A farmer’s daughter from Aberdeenshire who lost her hearing as a child, she learned to feel music through her body and built a career that did not…
The printer's daughter who became the voice of Lebanon and refused to sing for either side in its civil war
Born poor in Beirut and discovered singing at school, she became the most loved singer in the Arab world, then spent fifteen years of civil war…
Beaten, jailed and burned out of his home, he kept playing the music that mocked Nigeria's generals
Sent to London to study medicine, he enrolled at music college instead, invented Afrobeat and spent the rest of his life being raided, jailed and…
Expelled from school for defending Picasso, he made rotund figures Colombia's best-known artistic export
Sent to bullfighting school by his family, he chose painting instead and turned exaggerated, rounded figures into a signature style, later using it…
Divorced and hospitalised in her teens, she became Iran's most daring modern poet and a filmmaker
Married at sixteen and divorced within a few years, losing custody of her only child, she wrote confessional poetry that scandalised 1950s Iran and…
Turned a lifetime of physical pain into some of the most recognisable paintings of the twentieth century
Polio as a child and a horrific bus accident at 18 left her in pain for life. She began painting flat on her back and never stopped telling the truth…
Pawned the heater and the mixer to finish a novel, then could only afford to post half of it
A journalist who shut himself away for eighteen months while his wife ran up debts with the butcher, he emerged with One Hundred Years of Solitude…
Shot through the throat in Spain, he typed Nineteen Eighty-Four in bed on Jura as tuberculosis killed him
He washed dishes in Paris, slept rough in London and fought fascism in Spain before his two most famous books were written, one rejected by every…
A farmer’s widow who took up painting at 78 and was famous by 80
Anna Mary Robertson Moses left home at 12 to work as a hired girl, raised a family on farms and only began painting in her late seventies when…
Typed with two ballpoint pens when her hands failed, then became Korea's first Nobel laureate in literature
A quiet novelist from Gwangju who wrote about violence, grief and the body, she was blacklisted by her own government, then in 2024 became the first…
Left bedridden by cancer surgery at 71, he picked up scissors and began what he called his second life
A law clerk who discovered painting during a long illness at 20, was mocked as a wild beast, and when he could no longer stand at an easel invented a…
Painted abstract pictures before Kandinsky and ordered them hidden for twenty years after her death
A Swedish painter who made huge abstract canvases from 1906, years before the men credited with inventing abstraction, and left instructions that…
Made The Great Wave at 70, after a stroke and a lifetime of poverty, and thought his real work was still ahead
A Japanese print artist who changed his name thirty times, moved house more than ninety times and produced his most famous images in his seventies,…
Jailed without trial by the government he served, he drew in secret and later filled Tate Modern
A Sudanese painter who fused Arabic calligraphy with modern art, he was imprisoned for six months in 1975 on a false charge, drew on scraps in his…
Wrote coded novels under one of Europe's harshest dictatorships and defected days before it fell
A novelist who wrote allegorical fiction under Enver Hoxha's isolated Stalinist regime, balancing precariously between official tolerance and…
Paralysed by polio at four, he was told a violinist had to stand, and has played sitting down ever since
A child in Tel Aviv whose legs were left paralysed by polio, he taught himself on a toy fiddle, was refused by a conservatory for being too small,…
