Mother Teresa

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (1910–1997) was born in Skopje to an Albanian family, came to India as a teenage nun, and in 1950 founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, a congregation that grew to work in more than a hundred countries. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was canonised in 2016. Her recorded sayings are plain and repetitive by design — she distrusted grand statements and returned constantly to small acts done with attention. The posthumous publication of her letters, revealing decades of spiritual darkness alongside that work, made her a more complicated and arguably more compelling figure than the one on the posters.