Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet and essayist born in Edinburgh, whose restless health and love of travel took him across Europe, America and eventually the South Pacific, where he settled in Samoa and spent his final years. Trained initially in law, he abandoned it for a literary career, becoming one of the most widely read and translated authors in the English language.

His reputation rests above all on a handful of enduring works: the adventure novel Treasure Island, which helped define the pirate story as a genre; Kidnapped, a tale of intrigue set in the Scottish Highlands; and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a gothic novella exploring the duality of human nature that became one of the most influential works of psychological horror. He was also a skilled poet, notably with the children's collection A Child's Garden of Verses, and a master of the short story, gathered in collections such as New Arabian Nights.

Stevenson was a major literary celebrity in his own lifetime, admired by contemporaries for the clarity and craftsmanship of his prose, and his influence has endured through countless adaptations of his work for stage, film and other media. He remains one of the most translated authors in the world, a testament to the lasting international appeal of his storytelling.