Lydia Cabrera was a Cuban independent ethnographer, writer, and literary activist. She was an authority on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. During her lifetime she published over one hundred books; little of her work is available in English. Her most important book is El Monte, which was the first major ethnographic study of Afro-Cuban traditions, herbalism and religion. First published in 1954, the book became a "textbook" for those who practice Lukumi and Palo Monte both religions reaching the Caribbean through enslaved Africans. Her papers and research materials were donated to the Cuban Heritage Collection - the largest repository of materials on or about Cuba located outside of Cuba - forming part of the library of the University of Miami. A section in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's book Tres Tigres Tristes is written under Lydia Cabrera's name, in a comical rendition of her literary voice. She was one of the first writers to recognize and sensitively publish on the richness of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. She made valuable contributions in the areas of literature, anthropology, art, ethnomusicology, and ethnology.
Lydia Korneyevna Chukovskaya was a Soviet writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident. Her deeply personal writings reflect the human cost of Soviet repression, and she devoted much of her career to defending dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. The daughter of the celebrated children's writer Korney Chukovsky, she was wife of scientist Matvei Bronstein, and a close associate and chronicler of the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann's Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
Lydia Goehr is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. Her research specialties include the philosophy of music, aesthetics, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophy.
Lydia Hoyt Farmer (née, Hoyt; July 19, 1842 or 1843 – December 27, 1903) was a 19th-century American author and women's rights activist. For many years, Farmer contributed to the leading newspapers and magazines, on various lines: poems, essays, juvenile stories, historical sketches and novels. She was of a deeply religious nature, and endeavored to tinge all her writings with a moral as well as an amusing sentiment. She edited What America Owes to Women, for the Woman's Department of the World's Columbian Exposition. Her works included: Aunt Belindy's Point of View; The Doom of the Holy City; A Story Book of Science; A Knight of Faith; Short History of the French Revolution; Girls' Book of Famous Queens; What America Owes to Women; and others. Farmer died in 1903.
Lydia Kang is an American author and internal medicine physician, best known for her adult historical novel Opium and Absinthe: A Novel and her medical nonfiction book Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, co-written with Nate Pedersen.
Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, known by her pen name Lydia Koidula, was an Estonian poet. Her sobriquet means 'Lydia of the Dawn' in Estonian. It was given to her by the writer Carl Robert Jakobson. She is also frequently referred to as Koidulaulik – 'Singer of the Dawn'.
Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism.
