Anefo / Croes, R.C. · CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Left school at fifteen, was tried in Leningrad in 1964 for "social parasitism" — the transcript, smuggled out, made him famous — and served eighteen months of hard labour in the Arctic before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. He rebuilt himself in English, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, and became American poet laureate, an unusual thing for a man who had arrived with no country. Asked at his trial who authorised him to be a poet, he said: who authorised me to join the human race?