Her first novel was returned unread; she published everything anonymously and died at 41
A clergyman’s daughter with no money of her own, she wrote at a small table in a shared sitting room, sold one book to a publisher who sat on it for…
Paralysed except for one eyelid, he blinked a whole book into existence and died two days after it appeared
The editor of French Elle was left with locked-in syndrome by a stroke at 43 and dictated a memoir letter by letter with his left eyelid; it was…
Nine years cataloguing in a small library, then made director of the national one as he went blind
An obscure municipal librarian in his forties, ridiculed and demoted by Perón, he wrote the stories that reinvented fiction in his spare hours and…
Lost a hand and an eye in a childhood accident, he went on to paint Mexico's harshest murals
Blinded in one eye and missing a hand after a gunpowder accident as a teenager, he trained himself to paint one-handed and became one of Mexico's…
Fled Hitler as a child and wrote The Tiger Who Came to Tea at 45
A refugee whose father’s books were burned by the Nazis, she worked as a textile designer and television scriptwriter before her first picture book…
Told his brain-damaged newborn son would be better off dead, he chose otherwise and it remade his writing
A prize-winning young novelist whose son was born in 1963 with a severe brain condition, he refused the doctors' advice to let the child die and…
Collected rents by day for 42 years and painted the industrial north at night
A Salford rent collector who painted after ten o’clock at night once his bedridden mother was asleep, he had his first London exhibition at 51,…
Committed to an asylum in Spain after fleeing the Nazis, she escaped and became a leading surrealist
A wealthy English debutante who refused the role, she suffered a breakdown and forced psychiatric committal after fleeing occupied France, then…
Learned the cornet in a reform school for waifs and went on to change American music
Raised in the poorest part of New Orleans by a mother who was sometimes forced into prostitution, he was sent to a home for delinquent boys at 11,…
Worked for fifty years in near obscurity and had her first major retrospective at 70
She spent decades making sculpture in a New York studio while the art world looked elsewhere, then became one of its most celebrated figures in her…
Painted and taught for thirty years outside the art world's gaze, then won the Turner Prize at sixty-three
Born in Zanzibar and raised in London, she organised exhibitions of Black women artists in the 1980s when no gallery would, taught for decades in…
Went deaf in his twenties and wrote his greatest music when he could not hear a note of it
Beaten into practice by an alcoholic father and losing his hearing just as his career took off, he considered suicide at 31, decided to live for his…
Painted cinema hoardings for pennies in Bombay and became India's most famous painter, then died in exile
A billboard painter who slept on the pavement, he became the most celebrated and prolific artist of modern India, and at ninety, hounded by lawsuits…
Hid her aristocratic birth to get into art school and wove sculptures the size of rooms in a tiny flat
A landowner's daughter who saw her mother maimed by soldiers in the war, she concealed her origins under communism and made enormous hanging forms…
His village was erased when he was seven, and he spent his life writing it back into existence
A refugee at seven who crept back into Israel as an illegal resident in his own land, he was jailed for his poems, spent decades in exile and became…
Locked in her room until 29 by a strict mother, she turned her own body into her art
Raised under near-military discipline by a mother who kept a curfew on her into adulthood, she left Belgrade to make performance art that tests pain…
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…
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…
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…
Considered himself a sculptor, hated painting, and spent four years on his back under the Sistine ceiling
A stonecutter’s foster child who fought with popes, worked in filth and pain for years on commissions he resented, and was still chiselling marble…
Banned from her own country for three decades, she sang South Africa to the world from exile
A township singer who left for a film festival and found her passport cancelled, she spent thirty-one years in exile, testified against apartheid at…
Began ballet at 13 while living in a motel and became American Ballet Theatre’s first Black woman principal
Told she was too old, too short and the wrong shape for classical ballet, she began training at 13 while her family lived in a motel and rose to the…
A civil servant who wrote novels after work, was banned at home, won the Nobel and was stabbed at 82
He worked in Egyptian government offices for nearly forty years and wrote in the evenings, becoming the first Arabic novelist to win the Nobel Prize,…
