1859 – Kenneth Grahame, Scottish bank secretary and writer of children’s literature, best known for the novel, The Wind in the Willows.
1877 – Šatrijos Ragana, pen name for Marija Peckauskaite, Lithuanian romantic and humanist novelist, short-story writer, and teacher; her pseudonym translates to “Witch of Šatrija.”
1892 – Juana Fernández Morales de Ibarbourou (also known as Juana de América), four-time Nobel Prize-nominated Uruguayan writer and poet who was one of the most popular poets of Spanish America; her poetry, the earliest of which is often erotic, is notable for her identification with nature.
1902 – Lydia Pasternak Slater, Russian poet, translator, and research chemist.
1905 – Eva Dickson, Swedish writer, explorer, aircraft pilot, rally driver and adventurer who was the first woman to cross the Sahara desert by car.
1920 – Douglass Wallop, Tony Award-winning American playwright and author; his novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant was adapted into the musical Damn Yankees.
1925 – Warren Bennis, American writer, scholar, economist, and psychologist who is considered the founder of the contemporary field of leadership studies.
1931 – John McPhee, Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer of creative nonfiction who wrote on many subjects but is best known for his work about geology and geography.
1937 – Richard Fariña, American folksinger, songwriter, poet, and novelist, best remembered for his autobiographical novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.
1960 – Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and professor.
1961 – Maja Haderlap, Austrian writer, translator, and dramaturge, best known for her award-winning novel Angel of Oblivion about the Slovene ethnic minority’s transgenerational trauma of being treated as ‘homeland traitors’ by their German-speaking Austrian neighbors.
1967 – Aslı Erdoğan, award-winning Turkish writer, novelist, journalist, columnist, physicist, and human-rights activist
1970 – Hafid Bouazza, Moroccan-Dutch novelist and playwright whose sister is the noted journalist Hassnae Bouazza.
1980 – Devyani Saltzman, Canadian author, curator, and journalist; she is the granddaughter of weatherman Percy Saltzman and the daughter of film directors Paul Saltzman and Deepa Mehta.
