Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932 and educated at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met the poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. The couple settled permanently in England, and they had two children, a son and a daughter, before separating in 1962. She suffered from clinical depression for most of her adult life, and tragically ended her own life in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her works such as The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide. The Collected Poems, published in 1981, included previously unpublished works. For this collection, Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.