The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) includes a prescribed list of works for the Literature course, known as the Prescribed Literature in Translation (PLT) list. This list is updated periodically, but here are some commonly studied works from the list:
European Literature
- “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- “The Outsider” by Albert Camus
- “The Plague” by Albert Camus
- “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert
- “Perfume” by Patrick Süskind
- “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka
Asian Literature
- “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” by Yukio Mishima
- “Snow Country” by Yasunari Kawabata
- “Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami
- “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy
Latin American Literature
- “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez
- “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel García Márquez
- “The House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende
- “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez
African Literature
- “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
- “Season of Migration to the North” by Tayeb Salih
- “So Long a Letter” by Mariama Bâ
- “Cry, the Beloved Country” by Alan Paton
North American Literature
- “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
- “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
This list is not exhaustive and varies by school and specific curriculum choices. The IBDP provides a range of texts to ensure diverse cultural perspectives and literary traditions are represented.
Non-fiction Works
Essays and Memoirs
- “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf
- “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
- “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl
- “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood” by Marjane Satrapi
- “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank
Historical and Political Texts
- “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
- “Night” by Elie Wiesel
- “The Prince” by Niccolò Machiavelli
- “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
- “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Scientific and Philosophical Works
- “On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin
- “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn
- “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
- “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking
- “The Double Helix” by James D. Watson
Speeches and Letters
- “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr.
- “The Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln
- “The Ballot or the Bullet” by Malcolm X
- “We Should All Be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Cultural and Sociological Texts
- “Orientalism” by Edward Said
- “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
- “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir
- “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
- “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois
These texts provide students with a broad range of perspectives and critical insights into various aspects of human experience, history, science, and culture. The specific selection of non-fiction works can vary by school and curriculum choices within the IBDP framework.
Other Prescribed Texts
Drama
- “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett
- “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen
- “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller
- “Antigone” by Sophocles
- “Othello” by William Shakespeare
- “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov
Poetry
- “Selected Poems” by Emily Dickinson
- “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
- “Selected Poems” by Pablo Neruda
- “Songs of Innocence and Experience” by William Blake
- “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy
- “Selected Poems” by Seamus Heaney
Works in Translation
- “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (Spanish)
- “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe (English)
- “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (German)
- “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian)
- “The Plague” by Albert Camus (French)
Graphic Novels and Multimodal Texts
- “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi
- “Maus” by Art Spiegelman
- “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel
Children’s Literature
- “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
- “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
Multicultural and Postcolonial Literature
- “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy
- “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys
- “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
- “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
The specific selection of texts can vary by school and the particular focus of the IBDP curriculum at that institution. The goal is to provide a diverse range of voices and genres to help students develop a broad understanding and appreciation of literature.
Free Choice by English Melon IB
- “Byeble” by Biju John.