George Bernard Shaw

Born in Dublin in 1856, George Bernard Shaw has the distinction of being the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize (for Literature in 1925) and an Academy Award (for his screenplay adaptation of 1938's 'Pygmalion'). His plays are the most widely produced in English language theatre after Shakespeare. A politically active socialist, dedicated vegetarian and a scathing wit he wrote five unpublished novels and worked as a drama critic before finding his true vocation as a playwright, alongside contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde, G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells. "If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we both still only have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each now have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw