February 16 Writer Birthdays
February 16 Writer Birthdays
- 1927 - Luísa Dacosta (born Marie Louise Pinto Saraiva dos Santos), Portuguese short story writer, poet, anthologist.
- 1927 - David Bryon Davis, American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world.
- 1927 - Shahidullah Kaiser, Bangladeshi novelist and writer.
- 1944 - Richard Ford, American author, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his book Independence Day.
- 1953 - Roberta Williams, American video game designer and writer.
- 1954 - Iain Banks, Scottish author of fiction and science fiction.
- 1956 - Paul Gilroy - British author, professor, and historian of black culture.
- 1331 - Coluccio Salutati, Tuscan humanist, writer, orator, and man of letters who was one of the most important political and cultural leaders of Renaissance Florence; he amassed a collection of 800 books, at the time the largest library in Florence.
- 1829 - Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, an American novelist, historian, and biographer from the prominent southern Percy family.
- 1831 - Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (Никола́й Семёнович Леско́в), Russian novelist, short story writer, and journalist who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky; he was praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form and admired by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky.
- 1834 - Ernst Haeckl, German natural philosopher; promoter of Darwin's ideas in Germany.
- 1838 - Henry Adams, American historian and novelist whose posthumously published autobiography won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize; he was descended from two U.S. presidents.
- 1883 - Elizabeth Craig, Scottish journalist and cookbook author.
- 1886 - Van Wyck Brooks, American historian and biographer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award for The Flowering of New England.
- 1904 - George F. Kennan, American diplomat and Cold War figure, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of seventeen books, including a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner.
- 1915 - Elisabeth Eybers, South African poet who wrote mainly in Afrikaans, but translated some of her own work into English.
- 1957 - Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Jr., American actor, director, author, and TV host for the PBS children's series about books, Reading Rainbow; he is also well known as an actor for his roles as Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the young Kunta Kinte in the seminal television miniseries Roots.
- 1958 - Natalie Angier, American science journalist and non-fiction author.
- 1968 - Warren Ellis, English author of fiction and comic books.
- 1973 - Maureen Johnson, American author of young adult fiction.
