BBC Announced The 100 Stories That Shaped the World
See which stories qualify for the list
Published in
4 min readJul 28, 2022
No one on this planet has any doubt that stories are the most powerful things shaping our world. They get inside us, influence our brains, and affect our emotions.
We are made of stories. They keep our reins.
In April 2019, BBC Culture asked experts from around the world to select the five stories that had the most profound impact in shaping the world.
108 authors, academics, journalists, critics, and translators from 35 countries picked the top five stories that had a remarkable influence on the world. These stories were chosen from among novels, poems, folk tales, and dramas, and the final results as the 100 most influential stories are picked out of these nominees.
Some facts about the list:
- Female authors has written 23 of the 100 works. As a result, the top 100 story list’s authors are 77 percent male.
- The selection committee is slightly dominated by women, with 60% being female and 40% being male.
- Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka were the most popular authors, each with three stories among the top 100.
