24 August: today's birthdays

• Yasser Arafat - Palestinian politician born in Egypt. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
• Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine short-story author, essayist, poet, and translator, born Jorge Francisco Isidore Luis Borges Acevedo. His best-known works are The Aleph and Fictions
• A. S. Byatt - Pseudonym of Antonia Susan Drabble, English writer. She wrote Morpho Eugenia and Possession
• Dave Chappelle - American comedian
• Paulo Coelho - Brazilian writer and poet. The Alchemist and The Pilgrimage are his most famous novels
• Pierfrancesco Favino - Italian actor and dubber. He won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, for his role in the film Padrenostro (Our Father), directed by Italian director Claudio Noce.
• Stephen Fry - English actor, comedian, journalist and film director, born Stephen John Fry. He starred in Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster
• Rupert Grint - English actor
• Mike Huckabee - American politician
• Duke Kahanamoku - American Olympic medalist in swimming who spread surfing as a sport. He was also a lawyer and an actor 
• Takashi Miike - Japanese film director, screenwriter and actor
  
• Jean Rhys - Pen name of English novelist Ella Gwendolen Rees William. She wrote the novel Wide Sargasso Sea, prequel of Jane Eyre written by Charlotte Brontë
• Howard Zinn - American historian