Oscar Wilde

Born in Dublin in 1854, he became one of the best-known literary figures of the late Victorian era: an Irish poet, playwright, novelist, and critic closely linked with the Aesthetic movement. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and later at Oxford, where his flair for language and performance helped shape the public persona that would make him famous.

His best-known books include The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his stage comedies—especially Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest—made him one of London's most celebrated dramatists in the 1890s. His writing is loved for its elegance, paradoxes, and jokes that reveal serious truths about society, manners, and desire.

The final years of his life were marked by prosecution, imprisonment, and exile after the trials of 1895. He died in Paris in 1900, but his reputation endured, and his work remains central to English-language literature for its brilliance, theatrical charm, and emotional depth.