Rabindranath Tagore - Selected Short Stories (Master's Collections) About the Author Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali Scholar who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verses", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal" , Tagore's poetry was viewed as spiritual and impulsive; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal.