Who Is Wasim Akram?

1. A Lahore teenager with no first-class cricket

Wasim Akram was born on 3 June 1966 in Lahore, Pakistan, into an upper-middle-class family, and grew up in the comfortable suburb of Model Town. His father was a successful businessman, and the young Wasim was sent to the Cathedral School in Lahore, where his main sporting obsession was table tennis. From the age of ten he lived with his grandparents, and his grandfather, a passionate cricket follower, introduced him to the sport. He studied fine arts at Islamia College in Lahore, but his success in local club cricket brought him to the attention of the state selectors, and his rise was so fast that it remains one of the most remarkable in the history of the game: he made his first-class, one-day international and Test debuts within the space of three months at the turn of the 1984-85 season, as a teenager, having played almost no first-class cricket at all.

His one-day debut came against New Zealand at Faisalabad in November 1984, when he was eighteen, and his Test debut followed against the same opponents at Auckland in January 1985. That a national side would pick a bowler with so little domestic experience was a measure of how obviously talented he was: tall, athletic, left-armed, and able to swing the ball both ways at genuine pace. He had, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, a staccato run-up and a hurried delivery stride that betrayed the lack of proper coaching early in his career, but the raw material was extraordinary. Within a few years he was a regular in the Pakistan side, and barring periods of injury or political upheaval he remained one for nearly two decades, captaining the side frequently before his retirement in 2003.

The speed of his promotion also shaped the way he learned the game. Unlike most fast bowlers, who spend years in domestic cricket refining their action, Akram learned his craft in international matches, against the best batters in the world, under the guidance of senior players — above all his mentor Imran Khan, who taught him the art of reverse swing and the discipline of bowling to a plan. It was an education that left him, in some ways, permanently unconventional: his action was never textbook, his run-up never smooth, and his bowling was built on feel and variation rather than on a repeatable mechanical model. That unconventionality became his strength, because batters could never quite settle against a bowler whose next ball might do something entirely different.

2. The 1992 World Cup: the final that made him a legend

Akram's defining moment came at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 25 March 1992, in the final of the World Cup against England. Pakistan, who had begun the tournament so badly that they were nearly eliminated, had reached the final under Imran Khan's captaincy, and they batted first, scoring 249. England's chase was going well when Akram, bowling his second spell, produced two deliveries that changed the match and entered cricket folklore. First he bowled Allan Lamb with a ball that swung in late, and then, with the very next delivery, he bowled Chris Lewis with one that swung away. Two wickets in two balls, both bowled, both unplayable, and England's chase collapsed. Akram finished with three wickets, and he had earlier scored 33 runs from nineteen balls with the bat, hitting the ball with a freedom that had become his trademark in the lower order.

He was named Player of the Match, and the final became the moment that fixed his reputation around the world. It also mattered for what it meant in Pakistan, where the 1992 World Cup win remains the most celebrated achievement in the country's sporting history, a source of national pride that has only grown with time. Akram was twenty-five, and the performance announced him as a bowler for the biggest occasions, a reputation he would confirm repeatedly over the next decade. The two balls to Lamb and Lewis are still shown in highlight reels and still discussed by coaches as examples of what swing bowling, at its best, can do: not merely to beat the bat, but to defeat a batter's judgement entirely, so that the ball is past him before he has decided what it is.

The World Cup win also began the most successful phase of his career. In the years that followed he became Pakistan's leading bowler in all formats, took wickets in every country he played in, and developed the partnership with Waqar Younis that would become the most feared new-ball and old-ball combination of the 1990s. The two of them, bowling in tandem, could dismantle a batting order with the new ball and then return with the old ball to reverse-swing it away. It was a combination built on contrast — Waqar's pace and toe-crushing yorkers, Akram's swing and subtlety — and it made Pakistan, for a decade, the team no one wanted to face with the ball in hand.

3. The craft: swing, reverse swing and the yorker

To understand Akram's greatness, it helps to understand what swing bowling is. A fast bowler who releases the ball with the seam angled can make it curve in the air, in towards or away from the batter, and the later the movement comes, the harder it is to play. Akram could move the ball both ways, late, at pace, and he could do it with the new ball and with the old ball, which is a much rarer skill. With the old ball he and Waqar Younis developed the use of reverse swing — making a worn ball swing in the opposite direction to the conventional one — to a level no one had seen before. Reverse swing had been known in Pakistan domestic cricket for years, but Akram and Waqar brought it to international cricket, and their command of it was so complete that it prompted allegations of ball-tampering from opponents who could not explain how the ball was moving.

The allegations were never proved, and Akram always denied them, but they followed him through his career and they remain part of his story. The honest account is that reverse swing is a legal skill, dependent on keeping one side of the ball polished and the other rough, and that Akram's mastery of it was a matter of technique and feel rather than of any forbidden practice. What made him special was not one delivery but the range: inswing, outswing, the yorker at the toes, the bouncer, the slower ball, and the ability to bowl any of them from a similar action, so that the batter had no clue what was coming. He had, as Britannica puts it, one of the most varied arsenals in cricket history, and he used it with a cricketer's intelligence, setting batters up over several balls before delivering the one that dismissed them.

His batting, too, was part of his value. Akram was an aggressive lower-order batter who could change a match in an hour, and his most famous innings with the bat came against Zimbabwe at Sheikhupura in October 1996, when he scored 257 not out, the highest Test innings by a number-eight batter, including twelve sixes in a Test innings — a record at the time. The innings was characteristic: he came in with Pakistan in trouble, attacked from the start, and turned the match around. It is a reminder that Akram was not merely a bowler who could bat a little, but a genuine all-rounder, in the class of his mentor Imran Khan and of Ian Botham and Richard Hadlee, the great all-rounders of the previous generation. His Test batting average of just over twenty-two does not capture the impact of innings like that one, which were worth far more than their runs.

4. Captain, controversy and the 1999 World Cup final

Akram captained Pakistan frequently through the 1990s, and in the 1998-99 season he led the side to the final of the World Cup in England, where they were beaten by Australia. The final was a disappointment — Pakistan were bowled out cheaply and lost heavily — but reaching it was a considerable achievement, and Akram's leadership in the tournament, including a fine semi-final performance, was widely praised. His captaincy, though, was always complicated by the politics of Pakistan cricket, a board and a dressing room in which factions, regional loyalties and personal rivalries were a constant background. He was captain, dropped, and captain again several times, and his relationship with the board was rarely smooth. That he survived as a player through all of it, and kept performing, says something about how indispensable he was.

The same period brought the most serious controversy of his career. Pakistani cricket in the late 1990s was dominated by allegations of match-fixing, and Akram was named in the inquiry conducted by Justice Malik Mohammad Qayyum into the allegations. He was implicated but never charged, and he was officially cleared in September 1999, according to Britannica, and he continued his career without interruption. The episode remains contested: critics have argued that the inquiry's findings raised questions that were never fully answered, while his supporters point out that no charge was ever brought, that he was cleared, and that he went on to play four more years at the highest level, including reaching the milestone of five hundred one-day wickets. Any honest account of his career must record both the allegation and the outcome, and must not present either as the whole story.

There were other controversies, smaller but telling. The reverse-swing allegations never went away, and were raised again by opponents in England and Australia whenever Pakistan bowled a side out cheaply with an old ball. Akram's response was always the same: that reverse swing was a skill, that it could be learned, and that the real question was why other teams did not learn it. In time, he was proved right — reverse swing is now a standard part of every fast bowler's repertoire, taught in academies around the world, and the bowler who did most to bring it into the open is recognised as one of the great innovators of the game. The controversies, in other words, were the price of being ahead of his time, and they have faded as the game has caught up with him.

5. The numbers: 414, 502 and the first to five hundred

Akram retired from international cricket in 2003, after the World Cup in South Africa, having taken 414 wickets in 104 Test matches, the most by any Pakistan bowler, and 502 wickets in 356 one-day internationals. He was the first bowler in history to reach five hundred one-day wickets, a milestone he passed in 2003, and the figure stood as a record for many years. His Test record is remarkable for its longevity and its range: he took ten wickets in a match five times, five wickets in an innings twenty-five times, and he took wickets against every opponent he faced, in every country. His one-day record is, if anything, more impressive, because it was built in an era when one-day cricket was the format in which batters dominated, and when five hundred wickets meant playing more than three hundred matches at the highest level without a serious loss of pace or accuracy.

The numbers, though, understate his value, because they do not capture the wickets that changed matches. His three wickets in the 1992 final, his spells against England at Lord's and The Oval, his destruction of Australia's batting in the 1990s — these were performances that decided series and tournaments, and they are remembered in a way that a career average is not. His Test bowling average of 23.62 and his one-day average of 23.52 are both excellent, but they are not the best of his era; what made him the bowler batters feared was not the average but the possibility, on any given day, of a spell that no one could play. That is a quality statistics struggle to measure, and it is why the judgement of his peers — who voted him, in polls and in print, among the greatest fast bowlers of all time — matters as much as the record books.

He was named Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1993, and in 2009 he was inducted into the International Cricket Council's Hall of Fame, the formal recognition of a career that had ended six years earlier. The Hall of Fame induction placed him alongside the players he had learned from and played against, and it confirmed what had been clear for a decade: that he was not merely a great Pakistani bowler, but a great bowler in the history of the game. His record as Pakistan's leading Test wicket-taker still stands, and his one-day record stood for years after his retirement. For a bowler from a country whose cricket infrastructure was, for much of his career, chaotic and underfunded, the longevity of the records is itself a tribute.

6. Life after cricket: commentary, coaching and health

After retirement Akram became a cricket commentator, working for television networks around the world, and a bowling coach and mentor for various teams, including in franchise cricket. His commentary is valued for the same reason his bowling was: he explains the craft from the inside, describing what a bowler is trying to do with the ball, why a particular field has been set, and what a batter is struggling with, in a way that few former players can match. He has also worked as a bowling coach, passing on the skills of swing and reverse swing to a new generation of fast bowlers, and he remains one of the most respected voices in the game, consulted by boards and broadcasters alike whenever fast bowling is discussed.

His personal life has been marked by both happiness and loss. He was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of thirty, in 1997, at the height of his career, and he has spoken openly about managing the condition while playing international cricket, including the discipline of monitoring his blood sugar during long days in the field. His first wife, Huma, died in 2009 after a serious illness, a loss he has described as the hardest of his life. He later married Shaniera, an Australian, in 2013, and the couple have a daughter. He has also been open about his struggles with addiction to a prescribed painkiller after his playing career, and about seeking treatment for it, a candour that has been widely praised and that has helped to reduce the stigma around such issues in sport.

In recent years he has continued to work in commentary and in franchise cricket, and he remains a familiar presence at major tournaments, where his analysis of fast bowling is still sought out. He has not held a full-time national coaching role, and any claim about a specific appointment in 2026 would need to be verified against a current source; what is documented is the longer pattern of his post-playing life, as a commentator, a mentor and an ambassador for the game. He divides his time between Pakistan and Australia, and he remains, for Pakistani cricket fans, the standard against which every left-arm fast bowler is measured — a standard that, more than two decades after his retirement, no one has yet matched.

7. Legacy: why every left-arm fast bowler is compared to him

Akram's legacy is visible every time a left-arm fast bowler runs in. Before him, left-arm pace bowling was a niche skill, valued but rarely the main weapon of an attack; after him, every major team wanted a left-armer who could swing the new ball and reverse the old one, and the development of left-arm fast bowlers became a priority in academies around the world. The bowlers who followed — from the great left-armers of the 2000s to the current generation — all learned from his example, and many of them have said so directly. He changed not only how left-arm bowling was practised but how it was thought about: no longer a variation on the theme, but a weapon in its own right, capable of winning matches on its own.

His influence extends beyond technique. He showed that a bowler from Pakistan, without the coaching infrastructure of England or Australia, could become the best in the world through talent, intelligence and hard work, and he became a role model for a generation of Pakistani cricketers who followed him into the national side. He also showed that a fast bowler could be an all-rounder, a captain and a match-winner with the bat, and that longevity at the highest level was possible without losing pace or skill. The records — the first to five hundred one-day wickets, the most Test wickets by a Pakistani — are the measurable part of that legacy, but the larger part is the standard he set, and the way he raised the expectations of what a Pakistani fast bowler could be.

For readers who want to go further, the most useful next step is to watch his bowling, which is preserved in full on video, and to compare it with the bowlers who came after him. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; the broader story is about a craft — swing bowling — and a player who took that craft further than anyone before him. Wasim Akram did not merely take wickets; he changed the way fast bowling was understood, and the game has been catching up with him ever since. That is why, more than twenty years after his last international match, he is still the name that comes up whenever the question is asked: who was the greatest left-arm fast bowler of all?

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Wasim Akram
• Wikipedia — Wasim Akram
• ESPNcricinfo — Wasim Akram profile

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• Who Is Vladimir Putin? — Vladimir Putin has led Russia since 2000 — as president and, for four years, as prime minister. This explains his rise, his rule and his role in the world.
• Who Is Warren Buffett? — Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile mill into a vast conglomerate, and his letters taught generations value investing.
• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.