Authors Like Yann Martel

Daniel Defoe

English · Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Robinson Crusoe was published on 25 April 1719 with Crusoe himself named as author, “Written by Himself”, and many readers took it for a true account. Crusoe spends 28 years on his island and rescues the man he names Friday. The Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned for four years on Más a Tierra, is the usual suspected inspiration.

Moacyr Scliar

Brazilian · The Centaur in the Garden (1980), Max and the Cats (1981)

Scliar (1937–2011) was a physician from Porto Alegre who worked in public health and tuberculosis care alongside his writing. In Max and the Cats a young German flees Berlin after an affair brings him to the Nazis’ attention; his ship to Brazil sinks and he is left in a dinghy with a jaguar from the hold. Martel thanked Scliar in the author’s note to Life of Pi, saying a review of the novella had sparked his premise, though he had not read the book itself; in 2002 the Brazilian press criticised him for not consulting Scliar.

Jorge Luis Borges

Argentine · Ficciones (1944), The Aleph (1949)

Borges (1899–1986) became director of Argentina’s National Library in 1955 and was completely blind by the late 1950s. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in Ficciones, concerns an invented world that begins as an entry in an encyclopaedia. In 1976 he thanked the dictator Jorge Rafael Videla after a lunch with him; he later criticised the junta’s abuses.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Russian-American · Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962)

Nabokov (1899–1977), born in St Petersburg, left Russia after the revolution, wrote in Russian in Berlin and then in English in the United States. Pale Fire presents a 999-line poem by the dead poet John Shade, with a foreword, commentary and index by his neighbour Charles Kinbote, who believes he is the exiled king of a northern country called Zembla.

Every book by Vladimir Nabokov →

Richard Adams

English · Watership Down (1972), The Plague Dogs (1977)

Adams (1920–2016) first told the story of Watership Down to his two daughters on a car journey; four publishers and three agencies rejected it before Rex Collings published it in 1972, and it won the Carnegie Medal. The Plague Dogs satirises animal experimentation. He was president of the RSPCA until he resigned in 1982.

Julian Barnes

English · Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), The Sense of an Ending (2011)

Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters opens with a woodworm that stows away on Noah’s Ark and doubts Noah is fit to represent God; a later chapter retells the wreck of the Medusa and then examines Géricault’s painting of the raft.

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Ruth Ozeki

American · My Year of Meats (1998), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)

Ozeki, born in New Haven in 1956, was ordained a Soto Zen priest in 2010. In A Tale for the Time Being a Tokyo schoolgirl’s diary washes up on the coast of British Columbia after the 2011 tsunami, and a novelist named Ruth becomes obsessed with her fate; it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Book of Form and Emptiness won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022.

J. M. Coetzee

South African-Australian · Disgrace (1999), The Lives of Animals (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, won the Booker Prize twice, for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The Lives of Animals grew from lectures he gave at Princeton in 1997; in it and in Elizabeth Costello an ageing novelist argues that the treatment of animals is comparable to the Holocaust, and the books give her listeners room to object. He moved to Adelaide in 2002.

Pat Barker

English · Regeneration (1991), The Silence of the Girls (2018), The Women of Troy (2021)

Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943 and won the Booker Prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, the last of her Regeneration trilogy about the First World War. The Silence of the Girls tells the Trojan War through Briseis and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize in 2019; The Voyage Home (2024) completes the sequence. She was made a dame in 2025.

Madeline Miller

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

Miller studied classics at Brown and taught Latin and Greek while writing The Song of Achilles, the story of Achilles told by Patroclus, which won the Orange Prize in 2012. Circe gives the witch of the Odyssey her own voice. In September 2026 Ecco published Mestra, a short story drawn from Ovid.

Every book by Madeline Miller →