Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) became the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of his own prose versions of his poems, greatly admired by W.B. Yeats. He was a Renaissance man – poet and writer of fiction, composer and artist and playwright, educationalist and reformer. Among writers who translated his work were Gide, Neruda, Pasternak and Akhmatova. His world tours featured debates with figures as diverse as his friend and admirer Gandhi, Einstein, Ezra Pound and H.G. Wells. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore’s compositions.