Who wrote the first novel?

There is no single answer, because it depends on what you count as a novel, but the strongest candidate is a woman: Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court, who wrote The Tale of Genji in the early 11th century. It is the first novel by a woman to win global recognition, and the critic Harold Bloom said it anticipated Cervantes as the first novelist.

A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction, usually in prose. The word itself comes from the Italian novella, from the Latin for "new". By that measure, even older candidates exist: Greek and Latin prose stories from around the first century, such as Chariton's Callirhoe, arguably the earliest surviving Western novel.

What makes Genji feel so modern is its scale and care. Some four hundred characters move through it, and they all age in step, as in a real life. Murasaki wrote mostly in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, because writing in Chinese characters was then a masculine pursuit, and she may have delivered it chapter by chapter to other ladies of the court, like a serial.

In Europe, the usual answer is Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, published in 1605 and 1615 and considered the first modern novel. Its hero reads so many tales of knights that he decides to become one. Other historians, like Ian Watt, place the birth of the modern novel in the early 18th century with Robinson Crusoe. The title of "first novel" depends on the definition, and that argument is part of the fun.