Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Thakur (anglicised to Tagore) was born in Calcutta, British India, into the Brahmin caste, in 1861. Tagore began writing poetry at age 8 and published his first poems at age 16. Tagore also produced short stories, novels, songs, and paintings, revolutionizing the Bengali region’s literature and music and helping bring Indian culture to the West. In 1910, Tagore published Gitanjali, a collection of poems that became popular worldwide. The book was translated to a number of languages, and largely for the English Gitanjali, Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, becoming the first non-European to earn this distinction.