World Literature According to Wikipedia
Top 25 native writers of each language (i.e., writers that have mainly written in that language) that appear most frequently among the top 25 writers of the other 14 languages according to the following rankings:
The writers are ranked by the sum of the reciprocal ranks which is displayed after the name of each writer. Not all languages contain 25 native writers, since for these language less than 25 writers appeared among 25 writers of the other 14 languages (for the corresponding ranking measure).
To stress it once more, operationalization led to some contingent decisions, or, to quote our paper (preprint here), “declaring Virgil and Cicero ‘Italian’ writers was probably the most daring intervention when operationalizing our data” (so yes, we’re aware ;-).
| language | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | count |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | William Shakespeare (10.50) | J. R. R. Tolkien (2.59) | Robert Christgau (0.83) | J. K. Rowling (0.60) | Arthur Conan Doyle (0.49) | Roger Ebert (0.38) | Charles Dickens (0.37) | Edgar Allan Poe (0.36) | Stephen King (0.35) | Ernest Hemingway (0.26) | Agatha Christie (0.24) | George Orwell (0.19) | Oscar Wilde (0.19) | Will Durant (0.12) | Samuel Beckett (0.09) | Arthur Miller (0.09) | Isaac Asimov (0.08) | George Bernard Shaw (0.07) | H. G. Wells (0.05) | Jancis Robinson (0.05) | Salman Rushdie (0.04) | Arthur C. Clarke (0.04) | 22 | |||
| German | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2.04) | Bertolt Brecht (0.94) | Friedrich Schiller (0.30) | 3 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| French | Victor Hugo (0.72) | Molière (0.60) | Voltaire (0.58) | Jules Verne (0.25) | 4 | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Russian | Fyodor Dostoyevsky (0.88) | Anton Chekhov (0.78) | Leo Tolstoy (0.56) | Maxim Gorky (0.18) | Nikolai Gogol (0.05) | Alexander Pushkin (0.05) | 6 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Italian | Cicero (1.53) | Dante Alighieri (0.97) | Virgil (0.55) | Ovid (0.36) | Carlo Goldoni (0.08) | Horace (0.05) | Metastasio (0.05) | 7 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Spanish | Miguel de Cervantes (0.12) | 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Portuguese | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Chinese | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Persian | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Arabic | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Korean | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hungarian | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serbo-Croatian | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Romanian | 0 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Turkish | 0 |