Reading List

Authors Like Homer

The Iliad covers about seven weeks in the tenth year of a ten-year siege, and it is not really about the war. It is about one man's rage after a commander takes a woman from him, and what that rage costs everybody around him, and it ends not with the fall of Troy but with an old king kissing the hands of the man who killed his son. The Odyssey is a soldier taking another ten years to get home and finding that home has moved on without him. Whether Homer was one poet, several, or a tradition of singers who never wrote anything down is unresolved and probably always will be. What is not in doubt is that this is where European literature starts, and that 2026 has been an unusually loud year for it: Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been a box-office hit, Emily Wilson — whose 2017 translation sold over a million copies and whose Iliad followed in 2023 — published a review of the film in the London Review of Books that went viral, publishers are rushing out new editions, and Daniel Mendelsohn has a translation on the way. The ten below are what the poems became.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Epic and its afterlife · Two poems · Which translation to read · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

Virgil wrote the Roman answer and Ovid the collection everything else draws on, with Sophocles turning the same myths into tragedy. James Joyce moved the Odyssey to Dublin for a single day, Derek Walcott moved it to St Lucia and Christa Wolf gave Cassandra the narration. Two living novelists retell it, one philosopher wrote the essay that changes how you read it, and one gives the poem to the woman handed over in book one.

Every book by Homer →

Where to start if you loved Homer

If you want the Roman answer, read Virgil.

The Aeneid. A survivor of Troy, a burning city, and a hero who is tired.

If you want the rest of the myths, read Ovid.

The Metamorphoses. Two hundred and fifty stories, all of them a transformation.

If you want the best modern one, read Derek Walcott.

Omeros. Achille and Hector, fishermen on St Lucia, quarrelling over Helen.

If you want thirty pages that change the poem, read Simone Weil.

The Poem of Force. On what violence does to the winners.

If you want the argument against him, read Pat Barker.

The Silence of the Girls. The quarrel of book one, narrated by the woman in it.

If you want more books of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Homer

01
The Roman answer · Closest match

Virgil

Roman · the Aeneid (written 29–19 BC), the Georgics

The Aeneid follows a Trojan survivor out of the burning city, through a love affair in Carthage that ends in her suicide, down into the underworld and into a war in Italy to found the line that will become Rome. Virgil wrote it over eleven years at the request of the emperor Augustus, left it unfinished, and asked on his deathbed that it be burned; Augustus refused. It ends, abruptly, with an act of rage that the poem does not excuse.

Homer's most consequential reader. The first half rewrites the Odyssey and the second half the Iliad, on purpose and in public, and the whole thing is a Roman argument with a Greek inheritance — duty against desire, empire against homecoming. Virgil also gives you something Homer will not: a hero who is tired, dutiful and sad. Read Robert Fagles or Shadi Bartsch, and read it after the Odyssey.

— Lisanne
02
Where the rest of the myths live

Ovid

Roman · the Metamorphoses (8 AD)

The Metamorphoses runs fifteen books and some two hundred and fifty stories, all of them involving a transformation: Daphne into a laurel, Actaeon into a stag, Arachne into a spider, and on through Troy to Julius Caesar becoming a star. Ovid was exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea in 8 AD for reasons never fully explained and never allowed home. Almost every Greek myth you know in its familiar form, you know from him.

The single most useful book to read alongside Homer, because it is where the rest of the mythology comes from. Homer assumes you know the gods; Ovid tells you the stories, at speed, with a wit and cruelty entirely his own — he is far more interested in the victims of transformation than in the gods doing it. Read it in any order, a few stories at a time.

— Lisanne
03
The myths as tragedy

Sophocles

Greek · Oedipus the King (c. 429 BC), Antigone (c. 441 BC), Philoctetes

Sophocles wrote perhaps a hundred and twenty plays, of which seven survive complete. Oedipus the King is a man investigating a murder and discovering he committed it; Antigone is a woman who buries her brother against the law of the state and is walled up alive for it; Philoctetes takes a minor figure from the Trojan War — a man abandoned on an island with a wound that will not heal — and asks what the Greeks owe him.

What the next generation did with the same material. Homer narrates and Sophocles puts the characters on a stage to argue, which is how the myths turned into ethics. Philoctetes is the direct continuation of the Iliad's world and the bleakest thing in it. If the arguments between Achilles and Agamemnon are what grip you, this is where that conversation goes.

— Lisanne
04
The Odyssey in one Dublin day

James Joyce

Irish · Dubliners (1914), Ulysses (1922)

Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, through Dublin on 16 June 1904, mapping each episode onto a book of the Odyssey — the Cyclops becomes a nationalist in a pub, Circe a brothel, Penelope a forty-page unpunctuated monologue by Bloom's wife Molly. It was serialised, prosecuted for obscenity in the United States, and published in Paris on Joyce's fortieth birthday.

The most famous thing anyone has done with Homer, and the one that changed what a novel could be. Joyce's point is that an ordinary man buying a kidney for breakfast is as worthy of epic treatment as a king outside Troy, which is either a joke about heroism or a serious claim about it. You do not need the Odyssey to read Ulysses, but the schema is a good deal more fun if you do.

— Lisanne
05
The Odyssey in St Lucia

Derek Walcott

Saint Lucian · Omeros (1990), The Schooner Flight (1979)

Omeros is a book-length poem set among fishermen on St Lucia, where two men named Achille and Hector quarrel over a woman called Helen, a blind man called Seven Seas sees everything, and the poet travels to Africa, Boston and Dublin in a metre loosely modelled on Dante's. Walcott received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and founded a theatre workshop in Trinidad.

The finest thing done with Homer in the last fifty years, and it earns the comparison rather than borrowing it. Walcott takes the names and the wound and the sea and puts them where a colonised island can use them, asking what an inherited European epic is worth to people whose own history was taken. It is difficult and it is worth the difficulty. Start with the first thirty pages.

— Lisanne
06
Cassandra speaks

Christa Wolf

German · Cassandra (1983), Medea (1996)

Cassandra is a monologue delivered by Priam's daughter in the hours before her death, looking back at the fall of Troy from inside the royal household — the manoeuvring, the propaganda, the war party gradually winning, and the prophetess nobody believes. Wolf wrote it in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, and the parallels with the arms race were not accidental. She was among the most important German writers of the century and a contested figure after reunification.

The earliest of the major retellings from inside the losing side, and still the most politically serious. Wolf is not interested in giving a woman a voice as a literary gesture; she is interested in how a state talks itself into a war, and Troy is her case study. Read it before the recent wave of mythological retellings, because it is where a great deal of that impulse starts.

— Lisanne
07
The myths, retold now

Madeline Miller

American · The Song of Achilles (2011), Circe (2018)

The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad through Patroclus and won the Orange Prize in 2012; Circe takes the witch who turns Odysseus's men into pigs and gives her several centuries of her own life, including the parts the Odyssey has no interest in. Miller taught Latin and Greek for years, took about a decade over the first book, and the classical detail underneath the modern emotional register is exact.

The gateway for an enormous number of readers, and much better made than the category suggests. Miller's method is to find the character Homer passes over in a line and ask what their life looked like — which is a genuinely classical thing to do, since the Greeks retold these stories constantly. Read Circe after the Odyssey and the poem acquires a whole population.

— Lisanne
Every book by Madeline Miller →
08
Penelope's version

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · The Penelopiad (2005), The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

The Penelopiad is about two hundred pages narrated by Penelope from the underworld, with a chorus of the twelve maids whom Odysseus hangs on his return for having slept with the suitors — an incident the Odyssey disposes of in a few lines. Atwood interrupts the narrative with their songs, a lawyer's defence and an anthropology lecture, and refuses to let the hanging pass as housekeeping.

The sharpest short answer to the Odyssey's ending, and it turns on one of the poem's most unsettling passages. Homer's Odysseus comes home, kills the suitors, and then executes twelve enslaved women; the poem moves straight on. Atwood stops there. It takes an afternoon and it makes the homecoming permanently more complicated.

— Lisanne
Every book by Margaret Atwood →

Authors like Margaret Atwood →

09
The essay that changes the reading

Simone Weil

French · The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (1939), Gravity and Grace (1947)

Weil was a philosopher who taught, worked deliberately in a car factory and in the fields to share the conditions of labourers, and went to Spain during the civil war. She wrote her essay on the Iliad as France faced invasion, arguing that the true hero of the poem is force — the thing that turns a human being into a corpse, and turns the person wielding it into a thing as well. She died in England in 1943 at thirty-four.

Thirty pages that permanently alter how the poem reads. Weil's claim is that the Iliad is not a celebration of heroism at all: it is the most honest account ever written of what violence does to everyone it touches, including the winners, and its greatness lies in refusing to make the Trojans less human than the Greeks. Read it before or after book twenty-four. Nothing else in the criticism comes close.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against him

Pat Barker

British · the Regeneration trilogy (1991–95), The Silence of the Girls (2018)

Barker won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the last of a trilogy about shell shock and psychiatry in the First World War. The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad through Briseis, the queen of a sacked city who is given to Achilles as a prize and whose removal by Agamemnon starts the entire quarrel the poem is about. She has since added The Women of Troy and The Voyage Home.

The most direct challenge to the poem on the poem's own terms. The Iliad opens with the rage of Achilles over the loss of a woman it names in one line and then stops caring about; Barker hands her the narration and lets her describe the camp, the men, the deaths and the famous ransom scene from the floor of the tent. It does not make Homer smaller. It makes clear how much he leaves out, and that he knew.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Homer

Which translation of the Odyssey should I read?

Emily Wilson's, from 2017, is the one most new readers should start with: it is in iambic pentameter, exactly the same number of lines as the Greek, fast, plain and unpretentious, and it has sold over a million copies. Robert Fagles's, from 1996, is grander and more traditionally poetic and remains many readers' favourite. Robert Fitzgerald's is the elegant mid-century choice. A new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn is on the way. If you are choosing between the first two, read the opening ten lines of each and pick the voice you want in your head for four hundred pages.

Should I read the Iliad or the Odyssey first?

The Odyssey, for most people. It is a single adventure with a clear shape, one central character and monsters, and it is the more immediately enjoyable of the two. The Iliad is the greater poem and the harder one: no journey, a cast of dozens, long catalogues of ships and lineages, and a great deal of very specific violence. Read it second, in Emily Wilson's or Robert Fagles's version, and do not skip book twenty-four.

Is Christopher Nolan's film worth seeing?

It has been the year's big literary adaptation and a considerable commercial success, and it has sent a lot of people to the poem, which is the main thing. It also drew a sharply critical review from Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books, which went viral in July 2026: her objections were about the script rather than the spectacle — thin characterisation and motivation she found unbelievable. Worth seeing, worth reading the poem afterwards, and worth reading her review either way.

Did Homer exist?

Nobody knows, and the honest answer is that it does not much affect the reading. The poems come out of a long oral tradition of sung performance, with repeated phrases and set pieces that helped singers hold thousands of lines in memory, and they were written down at some point around the eighth or seventh century BC. Whether one poet composed both, or one composed each, or the name attached itself to a tradition, has been argued since antiquity. The repetitions you notice — rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea — are the machinery of that oral composition.

What should I read after Homer?

Virgil, because the Aeneid is a deliberate answer to both poems and you can watch him doing it. Ovid, for the mythology Homer assumes you already know. Then one retelling from the losing side — Christa Wolf, Pat Barker or Margaret Atwood — and one transplantation, either Joyce's Dublin or Walcott's St Lucia. And Simone Weil's essay, which is thirty pages and better than any introduction you will be given.

Are the modern retellings worth it?

The good ones are, and they are doing something the Greeks did constantly: taking a known story and telling it from a different position. Christa Wolf started the serious wave in 1983 with Cassandra, Margaret Atwood gave Penelope and the hanged maids their answer in 2005, and Pat Barker and Madeline Miller have carried it since. Read at least one alongside the poem rather than instead of it — the force of The Silence of the Girls depends entirely on what the Iliad does and does not say.

Why does the Iliad end where it does?

Because the subject is rage rather than the war. The poem covers a few weeks, does not include the wooden horse or the fall of Troy, and ends with Priam coming alone into the enemy camp to beg for the body of his son, and Achilles — who has been dragging that body behind a chariot — weeping with him and giving it back. It is the greatest scene in the poem and the reason Simone Weil could call it the only true account of force ever written.

Is it worth listening to rather than reading?

Genuinely, yes, and more than with almost any other book, because these poems were composed to be heard. Audra McDonald narrates Emily Wilson's Iliad and the metre carries the comedy and the grief in a way that is harder to catch on the page. Having the text in front of you while listening is the best of both, and it is how the poems were meant to arrive.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Reading list

Best Fiction Books

The novels that stay with you longest.

Reading list

Best Short Story Collections

The collections worth the time.

Author index

Books by Author

Every writer on the shelf.

Author index

Every Author Guide, A–Z

The full alphabetical directory.

From the bookshelf

“Tell me about a complicated man.”

— Homer, the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson.

If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.

Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations
Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!