Best Authors by Country

For a country of five million, an absurd concentration. James Joyce is the one everybody knows and the one most people abandon — start with Dubliners, not Ulysses. Edna O'Brien wrote Irish women's lives so honestly that The Country Girls was banned and burned at home in 1960. Roddy Doyle has the best ear for how people actually speak, Nuala O'Faolain wrote the memoir that did not perform, and Claire Keegan can do in eighty pages what most novelists need four hundred for.

The full Irish list →

George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, which is still the most intelligent novel in English about ordinary people and money. Charles Dickens built the plots everyone has borrowed since. Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki and raised in Surrey, won the Nobel Prize for narrators who cannot say what they mean. Zadie Smith and Hilary Mantel are the two who took the novel somewhere new this century, in opposite directions.

The full British list →

Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in 2022 for books of ninety pages with no metaphor in them. Marguerite Duras wrote desire and poverty in fragments that circle the same few images. Albert Camus is the one to read at twenty and again at fifty. Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis are the living pair writing class and escape, and they read each other.

The full French list →

Leo Tolstoy for the enormous canvas and Fyodor Dostoevsky for the fever, and the argument about which is greater has been running for a century and a half. Anton Chekhov invented the modern short story and is the easiest of the three to start with. Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for oral histories assembled from thousands of interviews, which is the twentieth century told by the people it happened to.

The full Russian list →

Elena Ferrante, whose identity has never been confirmed, wrote four novels about two girls from a poor Naples neighbourhood that sold in the tens of millions. Natalia Ginzburg rebuilt an anti-fascist family out of their catchphrases in Family Lexicon. Primo Levi, a chemist, wrote the clearest account anyone has written of Auschwitz. Italo Calvino is the one to read for pure invention.

W. G. Sebald wrote in German while living in England, in long unparagraphed sentences mixed with uncaptioned photographs, and changed what a book could be. Franz Kafka, writing in German in Prague, needs no introduction and is much funnier than his reputation. Thomas Mann for the big nineteenth-century machine, Jenny Erpenbeck for the best German novelist working now.

Tove Jansson, Finnish and writing in Swedish, wrote the Moomin books and then The Summer Book, which is a grandmother and a six-year-old on an island and almost nothing else. Karl Ove Knausgård wrote 3,600 pages about his own life and sold half a million copies in a country of five million. Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for poetry of extreme compression.

Toni Morrison is the one to start with and the one who raises the ceiling for everyone else. Herman Melville wrote the central American novel and died forgotten. Joan Didion made the essay an instrument, Cormac McCarthy took the western somewhere no one else would go, and Elizabeth Strout and Anne Tyler have spent fifty years proving that a family in a house is a large enough subject. For the Black literary tradition specifically — Baldwin, Hurston, Morrison, Wilkerson — there is a separate list.

The full American list →

African American authors →

Margaret Atwood has published more than fifty books and The Handmaid's Tale is the least strange of them. Louise Erdrich, of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, has written thirty books about Ojibwe families in North Dakota and Minnesota and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Robertson Davies is badly under-read outside Canada, and Michael Ondaatje writes the most beautiful sentences of any of them.

The full Canadian list →

Gabriel García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude, which invented the idea of Latin American fiction for most of the world and is still worth the reputation. Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the living novelist of the drug years and their aftermath, and The Sound of Things Falling is the way in.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote almost nothing longer than fifteen pages and reorganised world literature anyway; Fictions takes an afternoon. Silvina Ocampo is the cruel, strange one his circle tried to keep quiet about. Mariana Enriquez writes horror out of the dictatorship years and is the most exciting thing coming out of Latin America now.

Roberto Bolaño wrote The Savage Detectives and then 2666, and died at fifty before he could see either become famous in English. Isabel Allende is the one most read and the easiest to start with. Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for poetry; his politics and his conduct, including an assault he described in his own memoir, are part of the record.

Juan Rulfo published about a hundred and twenty pages of fiction in his life and Pedro Páramo is one of them — a man goes looking for his father in a village where everyone he speaks to turns out to be dead. García Márquez said it changed what he thought a novel could do. Valeria Luiselli and Fernanda Melchor are the two writing Mexico now.

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things and then wrote political essays for twenty years instead. Amitav Ghosh is the one for the long historical novel and for climate. Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance is the Emergency told through four people in one flat, and Perumal Murugan, writing in Tamil, is the writer who announced his own death as an author and came back.

The full Indian list →

Haruki Murakami is the famous one and the most divisive. Yoko Ogawa is the better writer — The Memory Police is about an island where objects disappear and people forget them. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, and Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman is a hundred and sixty pages that will unsettle you for weeks. Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in 1968.

Yiyun Li writes in English by choice and is one of the most precise prose writers alive. Ha Jin made the same decision after 1989. Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in 2012 and is read very differently inside and outside China. Eileen Chang is the earlier master, writing Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s.

Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in 2024, the first Korean writer to do so; The Vegetarian is told by three people around a woman who stops eating meat, and never by her. Hwang Sok-yong is the elder of Korean fiction, and Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny is the strangest book on this page.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) is where modern African literature in English begins, and it is short. Wole Soyinka was the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the one most read now, and Ben Okri and Oyinkan Braithwaite show how wide the range is — a Booker-winning spirit-child novel and a very funny book about a sister who keeps killing her boyfriends.

J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize twice and the Nobel Prize once, and Disgrace is the one to read first if you can take it. Nadine Gordimer wrote apartheid from inside it for forty years. Zakes Mda and Damon Galgut are the living pair, and Galgut's The Promise took the Booker in 2021.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o wrote his first novels in English, was imprisoned without trial in 1977, wrote a novel on prison lavatory paper, and afterwards renounced English for Gikuyu — an argument about language that is still the most important one in African letters. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is the novelist to read next.

Gerald Murnane lives in a small town in Victoria, has barely left the state and has never flown, and is regularly named as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Patrick White actually won it, in 1973. Helen Garner is the finest non-fiction writer in the country and Tim Winton the one who writes its coastline.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006 and was prosecuted at home the year before for what he said about the Armenian genocide; Snow and My Name Is Red are the two to start with. Elif Shafak writes Istanbul for a wider readership and has faced charges of her own.

David Grossman's To the End of the Land is about a mother who leaves home so that no one can bring her news of her son at the front; his own son was killed shortly before he finished it. Amos Oz wrote the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. Mahmoud Darwish is the Palestinian national poet, and Adania Shibli's Minor Detail is the recent novel worth reading.