Not all English literature was written by writers born in England. Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, Hilaire Belloc was French, Emma Lazarus was Jewish, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V. S. Naipaul is Trinidadian, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. The greatest Portuguese poet of 20th century, Fernando Pessoa wrote some poems in English, too. In other words, English literature includes all the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world.