This is Sebastián Salazar Bondy, whose other notable works include Something That Wants to Die, There’s No Gasoline in Heaven, and Flora Tristán.

This is Jean Genet, whose work often features social misfits or people on the outskirts of a community. His work, which is heavily steeped in absurdism, investigates morality as well as the constructs of racial and social identities.

This is Eugène Ionesco, whose works include The Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano, and Exit the King. Ionesco plays often emphasize the pointlessness of human existence and utilize disorienting elements such as non-sequiturs, dreamlike storytelling, and jarring verbal feats.

This is Ama Ata Aidoo, a poet, playwright, and novelist. She often incorporates elements of African legend, cultural identity, gender studies, and feminism into her work.

The playwright in question is Wole Solinka. His work often concerns colonialism and contemporary African politics, government, and corruption. His plays have been said to be influenced by traditional Yoruba drama and theatre of the absurd.

Brecht’s works, among which are Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, often encouraged audience participation and deep critical thinking. He is often considered a founder of Epic Theatre, although he chose to qualify or reject that classification. Mother Courage and Her Children is one of many of his plays written in response to the rise of Nazism.

This is Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His work (which includes novels and essays as well as drama) is often political and anti-nationalistic and is deeply invested in portraying power struggles between rulers and the poor or disenfranchised.

Shelley wrote this elegy memorializing John Keats, who had died of tuberculosis in Rome.

Passage adapted from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley, I.1-9 (1821)

Sir Walter Raleigh wrote this poem, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," in 1596 as a response to, and a parody of, Christopher Marlowe's famous pastoral poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." Marlowe's original is one of the best examples of the type of poem that is known as "Pastoral."

Passage adapted from "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh (1596)

This is The Faerie Queene, written by Edward Spenser in the late sixteenth century. The poem is distinguishable by its nine-line Spenserian stanzas, which follows an ABABBCBCC rhyme scheme, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last in iambic hexameter. This stanza also mentions one of the poem’s main characters, the Redcrosse Knight.

Passage adapted from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, I.ii.15.1-9 (1590)