section_path: Culture/Literature
section_name: Literature
paragraph_text: Literature
  
  British literature includes literature associated with the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Most British literature is in English. In 2022, 669 million physical books were sold in the UK, this is the highest overall level ever recorded. Britain is renowned for children's literature, writer's includes Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter who also illustrated her own books. Other writers include A.A. Milne, Enid Blyton, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett and J.K. Rowling who wrote the best selling book series of all time.
  
  The English playwright and poet William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist of all time. Other important English writers include Geoffrey Chaucer, known for The Canterbury Tales, the poet William Wordsworth and other romantic poets, also the novelists Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, George Orwell and Ian Fleming. The 20th-century English crime writer Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Twelve of the top 25 of 100 novels by British writers chosen by a BBC poll of global critics were written by women; these included works by George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing and Zadie Smith.
  
  Scotland's contributions include Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes), Sir Walter Scott, J. M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson and the poet Robert Burns. More recently Hugh MacDiarmid and Neil M. Gunn contributed to the Scottish Renaissance, with grimmer works from Ian Rankin and Iain Banks. Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, was UNESCO's first worldwide City of Literature.
  
  Welsh literature includes Britain's oldest known poem, Y Gododdin, which was composed most likely in the late 6th century. It was written in Cumbric or Old Welsh and contains the earliest known reference to King Arthur. The Arthurian legend was further developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 1320–1370) is regarded as one of the greatest European poets of his age. Daniel Owen is credited as the first Welsh-language novelist, publishing Rhys Lewis in 1885. The best-known of the Anglo-Welsh poets are Dylan Thomas and R. S. Thomas, the latter nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Leading Welsh novelists of the twentieth century include Richard Llewellyn and Kate Roberts.
  
  Northern Ireland's most popular writer is C.S. Lewis who was born in Belfast and wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. Irish writers, living at a time when all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, include Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw. There have been many authors whose origins were from outside the United Kingdom but who moved to the UK, including Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sir Salman Rushdie and Ezra Pound.