Authors Like Patti Smith

Arthur Rimbaud

French · A Season in Hell (1873), Illuminations (1886)

Rimbaud (1854–1891) wrote all his poetry before he was about twenty-one, much of it during a violent affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine, who shot him in the wrist in Brussels in 1873. He then gave up literature, worked as a trader in Aden and Harar, and died in Marseille at 37.

Jean Genet

French · Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), The Maids (1947), The Thief's Journal (1949)

Genet (1910–1986) was abandoned as a baby, grew up in reform schools and wrote his first novel in prison. Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief's Journal turn thieves, prostitutes and murderers into figures of ceremony and devotion. He is buried in Larache, Morocco.

Jim Carroll

American · Living at the Movies (1973), The Basketball Diaries (1978), Forced Entries (1987)

Carroll (1949–2009) grew up in New York, was a high-school basketball player and became addicted to heroin as a teenager, which The Basketball Diaries records. He dated Smith, and they once shared an apartment with Robert Mapplethorpe. With her encouragement he formed a band in California, and the Jim Carroll Band released “People Who Died” in 1980.

Bob Dylan

American · Tarantula (1971), Chronicles: Volume One (2004), The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Chronicles: Volume One describes his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961; critics have traced borrowed passages in it and in his Nobel lecture. A 2021 lawsuit accusing him of sexually abusing a girl in 1965 was dropped in 2022; he had denied the claim.

Every book by Bob Dylan →

Leonard Cohen

Canadian · Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Favourite Game (1963), Beautiful Losers (1966)

Cohen (1934–2016) was born in Montreal and published poetry and two novels before releasing his first album in 1967. Beautiful Losers is an experimental novel built around the seventeenth-century Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha. He lived for years on the Greek island of Hydra and spent much of the 1990s at a Zen centre on Mount Baldy in California.

Every book by Leonard Cohen →

Eileen Myles

American · Chelsea Girls (1994), Inferno (2010), Afterglow (2017)

Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1949, moved to New York in 1974 and was artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church from 1984 to 1986. Chelsea Girls is a book of autobiographical stories about drinking, sex and poetry in the East Village, and Inferno won a Lambda Literary Award. Myles uses they/them pronouns.

Kim Gordon

American · Girl in a Band (2015), No Icon (2020)

Gordon was born in Rochester, New York, in 1953, studied art in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 1980 to make visual art, co-founding Sonic Youth the following year. Girl in a Band covers her California childhood, the band and the end of her marriage to Thurston Moore; No Icon is a book of photographs and texts.

Every book by Kim Gordon →

Viv Albertine

British · Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014), To Throw Away Unopened (2018)

Albertine was born in Sydney in 1954, grew up in London and played guitar in the Slits from 1977 to 1982. Her first memoir covers punk London, Sid Vicious and the Clash's Mick Jones, and the years after the band; in 2019 The New York Times named it among the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. To Throw Away Unopened is about her family and her mother.

Every book by Viv Albertine →

W. G. Sebald

German · Vertigo (1990), The Rings of Saturn (1995), Austerlitz (2001)

Sebald (1944–2001) was born in Bavaria, taught for three decades at the University of East Anglia and died in a car crash near Norwich. His books mix walking, memory, history and uncaptioned photographs in a form between novel, essay and travel writing. Carole Angier's 2021 biography reported that some people whose lives he drew on felt their stories had been used without their consent.

Every book by W. G. Sebald →

Haruki Murakami

Japanese · Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before publishing his first novel in 1979. His novels follow solitary narrators through ordinary routines that open onto dreams, wells and other worlds. Smith reviewed Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki for The New York Times in 2014.

Every book by Haruki Murakami →