List of exophonic writers

This is a list of exophonic writers, i.e. those who write in a language not generally regarded as their first or mother tongue. For more on the phenomenon, see the main article Exophony.

The list below is deliberately brief, eschewing complex details of ethnicity/nationality and the like: the countries and/or languages given are merely a guide to the writer's principal origin and exophonic language - for details see the relevant article on the writer.

• Chinua Achebe, Nigerian native, who lived most of his later life in the United States. Native speaker of Igbo who wrote primarily in English.
• Sholem Aleichem, native of the Russian Empire who later emigrated to Switzerland. His native language was Yiddish but he also wrote in Hebrew and Russian.
• Nadeem Aslam, Pakistani-British novelist
• Samuel Beckett, Irish-French playwright and novelist
• José María Blanco White, Spanish-English writer
• André Brink, (South African) English-Afrikaans novelist
• Joseph Brodsky, Russian-American poet and essayist
• Paul Celan, Romanian-German poet
• Eugen Chirovici, Romanian-British novelist
• Joseph Conrad, Polish-British novelist
• Boris Fishman, Russian-American novelist
• Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-American poet
• Xiaolu Guo, Chinese-British novelist
• Najat El Hachmi, Moroccan-Catalan novelist and journalist
• Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian-American novelist and journalist
• Stefan Heym, German-American novelist
• Rolando Hinojosa, American-Mexican novelist
• Khalid Hosseini, Afghan-American novelist
• Nancy Huston, Canadian novelist
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-British novelist
• Tahar Ben Jelloun, Moroccan-French novelist
• Ha Jin, Chinese-American poet and novelist
• Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet
• Yasmina Khadra, Algerian-French novelist
• Arthur Koestler, Hungarian-British author and journalist
• Agota Kristof, Hungarian-French novelist
• Milan Kundera, Czech-French writer
• Tahar Lamri, Algerian-Italian journalist and short story writer
• Claudileia Lemes Dias, Brazilian-Italian novelist
• Yiyun Li, Chinese-American novelist and short story writer
• Jonathan Littell, American-French novelist
• Ramon Llull, Majorcan, Catalan-Latin-Arabic writer
• Amin Maalouf, Lebanese-French novelist
• Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist
• C.W. Nicol, Welsh-Japanese writer
• Téa Obreht, Bosniak-American novelist
• Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese-English/French poet
• Atiq Rahimi, Afghan/Persian-French and English novelist and filmmaker
• Ayn Rand, Russian-American novelist
• Elif Şafak, Turkish-English novelist and journalist
• Gary Shteyngart, Russian-American novelist
• Anna-Kazumi Stahl, American/German/Japanese-Spanish novelist
• Tom Stoppard, Czech-British playwright
• Yoko Tawada, Japanese-German poet
• Matthew Tree, English-Catalan writer and novelist
• Héctor Tobar, Guatemalan-American journalist and novelist
• Anselm Turmeda, Majorcan, Catalan-Arabic writer
• Voltaire, French philosopher who also wrote & published in English
• David Zoppetti, Swiss-Japanese novelist and journalist
• Merab Mamardashvili, Georgian philosopher who wrote exclusively in Russian