Petra Karin Kelly (29 November 1947 – c. 1 October 1992) was a German Green politician and ecofeminist activist. She was a founding member of the German Green Party, the first Green party to rise to prominence both nationally in Germany and worldwide. In 1982, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "forging and implementing a new vision uniting ecological concerns with disarmament, social justice and human rights."
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːtslav ˈɦavɛl] ; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.
His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident initiatives, including Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted. His political activities brought him under the surveillance of the StB secret police, and he spent multiple periods as a political prisoner, the longest of his imprisoned terms being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983. In this period, Samuel Beckett wrote a play Catastrophe in Havel's Support. Havel wrote his short play Mistake in response to Beckett. Both plays were published by Index On Censorship in 1984. In 2022, Reza Shirmarz, an Iranian playwright, was asked by Index to write a play (Muzzled) in response to both playwright after a couple decades presenting the ongoing issue of censorship and self-censorship.[1]
Havel's Civic Forum party played a major role in the Velvet Revolution that toppled the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989. He assumed the presidency shortly thereafter, and was re-elected in a landslide the following year and after Slovak independence in 1993. Havel was instrumental in dismantling the Warsaw Pact and enlargement of NATO membership eastward. Many of his stances and policies, such as his opposition to Slovak independence, condemnation of the treatment of Sudeten Germans and their mass expulsion from Czechoslovakia after World War II, as well as granting of general amnesty to all those imprisoned under the Communist era, were very controversial domestically. By the end of his presidency, he enjoyed greater popularity abroad than at home. Havel continued his life as a public intellectual after his presidency, launching several initiatives including the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, the VIZE 97 Foundation, and the Forum 2000 annual conference.
Havel's political philosophy was one of anti-consumerism, humanitarianism, environmentalism, civil activism, and direct democracy. He supported the Czech Green Party from 2004 until his death. He received numerous accolades during his lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the Four Freedoms Award, the Ambassador of Conscience Award, and the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award. The 2012–2013 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. He is considered by some to be one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century. The international airport in Prague was renamed Václav Havel Airport Prague in 2012.
Roberto Arlt (April 26, 1900 – July 26, 1942) was an Argentine novelist, storyteller, playwright, journalist and inventor.
Margarita Carrera Molina (16 September 1929 – 31 March 2018) was a Guatemalan philosopher, professor and writer. She was a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua and the 1996 laureate of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.
Juan García Ponce (22 September 1932 – 27 December 2003) was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, essayist, translator and critic of Mexican art.
Moritz Geiger (26 June 1880 – 9 September 1937) was a German philosopher and a disciple of Edmund Husserl. He was a member of the Munich phenomenological school. Beside phenomenology, he dedicated himself to psychology, epistemology and aesthetics.
Sergio Ricossa (6 June 1927 – 2 March 2016) was an Italian economist.
Born in Turin, in 1949 Ricossa graduated in Economics at the Turin University. In 1961 he was nominated associate professor of economic policy and financial discipline in the same university, becoming ordinary professor in 1963.A proponent of an economic liberalism without compromises, Ricossa's studies mainly focused on the theory of value. He collaborated with several magazines and with the newspapers Il Giornale and La Stampa, where his provocative articles often raised criticism and polemics.Ricossa was a Vice President of the Mont Pelerin Society, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and the honorary president of the Bruno Leoni Institute.
Doctor Frederik Carel Gerretson (born Kralingen, 9 February 1884 – died Utrecht, 27 October 1958) was a Dutch writer, essayist, historian, and politician.
Maria Konopnicka (Polish pronunciation: [ˈmarja kɔnɔpˈɲitska] ; née Wasiłowska; 23 May 1842 – 8 October 1910) was a Polish poet, novelist, children's writer, translator, journalist, critic, and activist for women's rights and for Polish independence. She used pseudonyms, including Jan Sawa. She was one of the most important poets of Poland's Positivist period.
Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (Polish pronunciation: [ˈgustaf 'herlink gru 'dʑiɲskʲi]; May 20, 1919 − July 4, 2000) was a Polish writer, journalist, essayist, World War II underground fighter, and political dissident abroad during the communist system in Poland. He is best known for writing a personal account of life in the Soviet Gulag entitled A World Apart, first published in 1951 in London.