Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague and, let's be honest, if he had a category for ‘most introspective author in the universe’, he'd easily win...

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The son of a Jewish family characterised by a strained relationship with his father, Kafka grew up in an environment where love was more a theoretical concept than a practical one. He worked as a lawyer and, ironically, devoted much of his life to bureaucracy, which perhaps fuelled his existential hatred and inspired his stories of administrative nightmares - like ‘The Metamorphosis’, where the guy wakes up transformed into a giant insect.

His health wasn't great (lung problems, you know, the life of a sick writer), and he died in 1924, aged just 40. Curiously, most of his works were published posthumously, because Kafka, with his touch of genius, asked them to destroy everything he had written.

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Lucky for us, they didn't comply. After all, who wouldn't want to live a bureaucratic nightmare with a dash of Kafkaesque existentialism?