Writers

8 Aug 1912

B. V. Raman

Astrologer and editor of The Astrological Magazine for over sixty years, and the author of the textbooks through which most English-speaking students still learn Jyotiṣa. The Raman ayanāṁśa, which Jade offers alongside Lahiri, is his.

Xno birth time

9 Nov 1934

Carl Sagan

Astronomer who worked on the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions and then explained them to everybody else, through Cosmos and a shelf of books. Assembled the Voyager Golden Record.

Xno birth time

7 May 1861

Rabindranath Tagore

Poet, composer and playwright, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913. Wrote the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, and reshaped Bengali letters almost single-handedly.

Xno birth time

25 Jan 1882

Virginia Woolf

Novelist and essayist who pushed narrative inward — Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves — and argued in A Room of One’s Own that the material conditions of writing decide who gets to write.

Xno birth time

5 Jan 1893

Paramahansa Yogananda

Monk who moved to the United States in 1920 and spent three decades teaching Kriyā Yoga there. His Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, remains the book through which most Western readers first meet Indian spiritual practice.

Xno birth time