1904 – Lin Huiyin (also known as Phyllis Lin or Lin Whei-yin), Chinese architect, author, professor, and architectural historian who was the first female architect in modern China, and who is especially known for her restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China. The American artist and architectural designer Maya Lin is her niece.
1906 – Jorge Icaza Coronel, Ecuadorian writer best known for his novel Huasipungo, which brought attention to the exploitation of Ecuador’s indigenous people by Ecuadorian whites.
1911 – Terence Rattigan, British playwright who was one of England’s most popular 20th century dramatists.
1915 – Saul Bellow, influential Canadian-born American writer, winner of the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Nobel Prize for Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Much of his work deals with the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness.
1925 – Nat Hentoff, American novelist, columnist, and music critic.
1925 – James Salter (born James Arnold Horowitz), award-winning American novelist, screenwriter, and Air Force pilot.
1927 – Altaf Fatima, Pakistani Urdu novelist, short-story writer, and teacher whose novel Dastak Na Do (“Do not Knock”) is one of the defining works in the Urdu language.
1928 – Maurice Sendak, National Book Award- and Caldecott Medal-winning American author and illustrator of children’s books whose works have sometimes been called dark and subversive but are extremely popular; American Library Journal has named his classic Where the Wild Things Are the number-one picture book ever, saying it ushered in a whole new era in children’s literature.
1929 – E.O. Wilson, American biologist, naturalist, and author who is the world’s leading authority on myrmecology — the study of ants.
1930 – Aranka Siegal, Newbery Honor-winning Ukrainian novelist, memoirist, and Holocaust survivor.
1936 – M.C. Beaton, pseudonym of Scottish-born author Marion Chesney, known for her Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series of mystery novels.
1939 – Angelita Trujillo (full name María de los Ángeles del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Trujillo Martínez), French-born Dominican writer best known for her biography of her father, former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
1944- Yona Wallach (also called Yona Volach), Israeli post-modernist poet and revolutionary feminist who explored themes of Jewish mysticism.
1947 – Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese author and scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history who translated Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses into Japanese; he was murdered in the wake of fatwas issued by Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for the death of the book’s author and “those involved in its publication.”
1949 – Linda Lael Miller, American author of contemporary and historical romance novels.
1952 – Kage Baker, Nebula Award-winning American science-fiction and fantasy writer who wrote novels, short stories, and nonfiction.
1955 – Ved Prakash Sharma, Indian writer of novels and screenplays in Hindi.
1973 – Niq Mhlongo, award-winning South African journalist and novelist who has been called “one of the most high-spirited and irreverent new voices of South Africa’s post-apartheid literary scene.” His novels are set in post-apartheid Soweto and written in Soweto dialect.
1983 – Samartha Vashishtha, Indian poet, translator, and technical writer.
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