Refused by a classical conservatory, she played bars to survive and became the voice of a movement
A child prodigy who dreamed of being the first Black concert pianist, she was turned down by the Curtis Institute and took a bar job under a false…
His father wanted him to be a doctor; instead he carried six centuries of qawwali to the world
Heir to a family of Sufi devotional singers who was steered away from music, he took over the family troupe in his twenties and became the most…
Wrote before dawn for years while washing dishes and sorting potato chips to pay rent
A shy, dyslexic girl who was told Black women did not write science fiction, she worked menial jobs for a decade while writing at two in the morning,…
Gave up painting at twenty-two, wrote unpublished for seven years and was later put on trial for what he said
A failed painter from a declining Istanbul family who shut himself in a room to write for years before anyone would print him, he won the Nobel Prize…
Built a capital city in the desert, was driven into exile by a coup and kept designing until 104
The architect of Brasília's curving concrete palaces, he lost his commissions and his country after the 1964 military coup, worked in Paris for years…
Self-taught docker turned novelist who learned film-making at forty to reach Africans who could not read
Expelled from school at fourteen, he unloaded ships in Marseille for a decade, wrote novels at night, and in his forties went to Moscow to learn…
Sold into a brothel as a teenager, she became the first Chinese woman shown in French collections
Orphaned young and sold into a brothel by an uncle, she was bought out by a reforming official who became her husband, then trained as a painter in…
Lost her home on a sinking barge and published her first novel at sixty, winning the Booker at sixty-three
A brilliant Oxford graduate whose adult life fell apart around an alcoholic husband, a houseboat that sank and years of teaching in crammers, she…
A carpenter who taught himself to paint, he was not recognised as a master until his forties
Apprenticed as a woodcarver at fourteen in rural Hunan, he taught himself to paint from copied manuals and did not gain wide recognition until middle…
Survived the Khmer Rouge camps as a child and spent his career filming Cambodia's buried memory
A child survivor of Khmer Rouge labour camps who lost most of his family to starvation and execution, he fled to France and became a filmmaker…
Pawned his wife’s jewellery to keep shooting a film that took three years and launched Indian cinema abroad
A commercial artist who had never made a film, he shot Pather Panchali on weekends with amateur actors and borrowed money, running out of funds again…
His first symphony was savaged so badly he could not compose for three years
A composer whose family lost everything and whose first symphony was destroyed by critics, he was talked out of despair by a doctor using hypnosis…
Rejected at his first audition for being unable to read, he learned from a waiter and won an Oscar
A tomato farmer’s son from the Bahamas who arrived in New York at 16 with three dollars, he was thrown out of a theatre audition for his accent and…
Blind from birth and signed at eleven, he took control of his music at 21 and made his masterpieces
Born six weeks early and blinded by the oxygen in his incubator, he had a number one hit at thirteen, took control of his career from Motown at 21,…
Lost a leg at sixteen and returned to the stage three years later on a rubber and wood prosthetic
A promising Bharatanatyam dancer whose leg was amputated after a bus crash and a botched treatment, she learned to dance again on a Jaipur foot, then…
Taped thousands of ordinary Soviet voices and turned them into books that dictators tried to bury
A provincial reporter who interviewed hundreds of Soviet women about their war, then the mothers of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and the people of…
Turned calligraphy into abstract art on her own terms and kept painting until she died at 107
Trained in classical calligraphy from the age of six, she broke away from it, spent two years among the New York abstract painters in the 1950s, and…
Wrote her first novel before dawn while working full time and raising two sons alone
A single mother and book editor who published her first novel at 39, she went on to write Beloved and become the first Black woman to win the Nobel…
Dropped out of Cambridge in despair, she wrote the first novel in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman
A novelist and filmmaker who left a medical degree at Cambridge unfinished, she returned home to write Nervous Conditions and later stood trial for…
Kept alive in a Khmer Rouge death camp because he could paint, he later testified against his captors
A sign painter imprisoned at the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng torture centre, he survived because his captors needed portraits of Pol Pot, then spent the…
Sold one painting in his lifetime and produced most of his work in the last two years of it
A failed art dealer, teacher and preacher who did not start painting until 27, he made around 2,100 works in a decade of poverty and mental illness,…
A nanny who took over 150,000 photographs and never showed them to anyone
She worked as a nanny for forty years and spent her days off photographing the streets of Chicago and New York. Her work was found in a storage…
Trained as a mime in Paris before turning charcoal drawings into acclaimed animated films
A failed actor who studied mime in Paris, he returned to Johannesburg and invented a technique of filming, erasing and redrawing charcoal images that…
Her first book was blocked by the censors and she disowned her second, then wrote 350 poems that won the Nobel
A quiet Kraków poet who published fewer than four hundred poems in her lifetime and threw the rest away, she wrote about ordinary bewilderment in…
