Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who wrote in Bengali and later in English, was the first Asian author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1913). His own translations from Bengali, his mother tongue, into English brought Tagore a wide readership in the West. This contributed to shaping his literary voice, in his lifetime, far from the current age of globalization, as the voice of the Far East. Visva-Bharati University (located in West Bengal), which Tagore was one of its founders, is now named after him.
