Follow Business Insider: You've seen Google's annual lists of trendy search terms, featuring things like  robin williams, world cup, and ebola , but those show only the most unusually popular terms, not the most popular terms overall.
Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
Hailing from Chile at the start of the 20th century, feminist poet (and once teacher to the famed Pablo Neruda) Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, who wrote under the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.