Who wrote the 11th-century Tale of Genji, often called the first novel?

Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Heian court around 1010 - so the strongest candidate for the first novel in the world was written by a woman in Japan, roughly six hundred years before Don Quixote.

It is a novel in the demanding sense: psychological interiority, a large cast developing over decades, and characters who age, disappoint each other and die. It runs to 54 chapters and something over a thousand pages, follows Genji through his affairs and political fortunes, and then continues for a third of its length after he is dead - which is a structural decision almost nobody made again until the twentieth century.

Court women wrote it because court men did not write in Japanese. Serious male writing was in Chinese, and Japanese prose was regarded as a women's medium - so the literature of the period that anyone still reads was produced almost entirely by women working in the language nobody took seriously. Murasaki Shikibu is not even her name; it is a court sobriquet. Her actual name is unknown.