Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Photo taken by: Dagny

Photo taken by: Hedning

Death: 23rd May 1906

Location: Vår Frelsers gravlund (Our Saviour's Cemetery), Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Cause of death: Stroke

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Major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and he influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill.

Elizabeth David (1913-1992)

Death: 22nd May 1992 
Location: St Peter's, Folkington, East Sussex, England 
Cause of death: Stroke 
Photo taken by: GuillaumeTell 

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British cookery writer who, in the mid-20th century, strongly influenced the revitalisation of the art of home cookery with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes. 

Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. She studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Greece. They were nearly trapped by the German invasion of Greece in 1940 but escaped to Egypt where they parted. She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo. While there she married, but the marriage was not long lived. 

After the war, David returned to England, and, dismayed by the gloom and bad food, wrote a series of articles about Mediterranean food that caught the public imagination. Books on French and Italian cuisine followed, and within ten years David was a major influence on British cooking. She introduced a generation of British cooks to Mediterranean food hitherto barely known in Britain, such as pasta, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, salami, aubergines, red and green peppers, and courgettes.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Death: 22nd May 1967 

Location: Ashes interred beneath the foyer of the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York, New York, USA 

Cause of death: complications after abdominal surgery, related to prostate cancer
Photo Taken by: Hitormiss

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American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. 

His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African-American identity and its diverse culture. He confronted racial stereotypes, protested social conditions, and expanded African America’s image of itself. 

In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter , won the Harmon Gold Medal for literature. The protagonist of the story is a boy named Sandy, whose family must deal with a variety of struggles due to their race and class, in addition to relating to one another.
Hughes's first collection of short stories was published in 1934 as The Ways of White Folks. These stories are a series of vignettes revealing the humorous and tragic interactions between whites and blacks.

Algot Untola (1868-1918)

Death: 21st May 1918 
Location: Hietaniemi Cemetery (Hietaniemen hautausmaa), Helsinki, Uusimaa, Finland 
Cause of death: Shot

Finnish writer and journalist.  Untola's most famous books were Harhama (1909) which he wrote under the name Irmari Rantamala, and Tulitikkuja lainaamassa (1910) under the name Maiju Lassila. Untola refused to take the state literature prize which he was awarded for these books books. 

During the Finnish Civil War in 1918 he actively supported the rebel side as a newspaper editor. He was arrested by government troops after the battle of Helsinki and shot dead while attempting to escape during a transport of rebel prisoners to the Suomenlinna prison camp.

Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973)

Death: 21st May 1973 

Location: Cimitero acattolico (Protistant Cemetery), Rome, Lazio, Italy
Photo taken by: Massimo Consoli

Buy books by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Italian writer and poet. He studded in Milan, but left his studies when he volunteered for World War I. During the war he was taken prisoner and spent several months in a German POW camp. Gadda returned to his studies after the war and graduated in 1920. He worked as an engineer until he devoted himself to literature in the 1940s. 

Gadda was a language innovator, who played with the stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay to his work. He is best known for the crime novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana / That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana(1946); in which he experiments heavily with language.