Henryk Sienkiewicz

Born in 1846 to an impoverished noble family in Russian-partitioned Poland, Sienkiewicz studied at Warsaw's Main School before working as a journalist and correspondent, traveling to the United States in the 1870s, where he lived for a time among Polish immigrants in California and filed travel letters that became a minor sensation back home.

He turned to historical fiction as a deliberate act of morale-building for a stateless nation: his Trilogy of novels set amid seventeenth-century Cossack and Swedish wars, written explicitly to lift Polish hearts, made him the country's most beloved writer, and Quo Vadis, set in Nero's Rome, became a worldwide bestseller translated into dozens of languages and helped win him the Nobel Prize in 1905.

He devoted his final years and considerable fortune to relief work for Polish civilians displaced by the First World War, chairing a Swiss-based relief committee, and died in exile in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1916, two years before the Poland he had spent his career imagining regained independence.