Authors Like Salman Rushdie

Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian · One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927 and worked as a journalist before One Hundred Years of Solitude made him famous across the world. The novel follows the Buendía family through generations in the invented town of Macondo, where a rain of yellow flowers and a woman who rises to heaven are reported as plainly as a massacre of banana workers. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and died in Mexico City in 2014.

Günter Grass

German · The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961), Dog Years (1963)

Grass was born in Danzig, now Gdańsk, in 1927. The Tin Drum is narrated from a mental hospital by Oskar Matzerath, who decides at the age of three to stop growing and drums his way through the rise of Nazism and the war. Grass won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006 he revealed that as a teenager he had served in the Waffen-SS, a disclosure that drew heavy criticism after decades in which he had spoken as a moral voice on Germany's past; he died in 2015.

Laurence Sterne

Irish-born English · The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sterne was born in Clonmel, Ireland, in 1713 and was a Yorkshire clergyman when the first volumes of Tristram Shandy made him a celebrity in London. The novel sets out to tell its narrator's life and is so distracted by his father's theories, his uncle Toby's war wound and its own digressions that it takes several volumes to get Tristram born. It includes a black page and a marbled page. Sterne died in 1768.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian, born in Kyiv · Heart of a Dog (written 1925), The Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, published 1966–1967)

Bulgakov was born in Kyiv in 1891, trained as a doctor and became a playwright in Moscow, where his work was repeatedly banned. The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil and his retinue, including a giant talking cat, arrive in Stalin's Moscow and expose its writers and officials, appeared in censored form more than twenty-five years after his death in 1940. Since 2022 his hostility to Ukrainian independence has made him a contested figure in Kyiv.

Every book by Mikhail Bulgakov →

V. S. Naipaul

Trinidadian-British · A House for Mr Biswas (1961), In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River (1979)

Naipaul was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932 into a family of Indian descent and came to Oxford on a scholarship. He won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, and died in London in 2018. After the fatwa he called it “an extreme form of literary criticism”. Patrick French's authorised biography (2008) recorded his use of prostitutes during his marriage and his violence towards his mistress, Margaret Gooding.

Arundhati Roy

Indian · The God of Small Things (1997), The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025)

Roy was born in Shillong in 1961 and grew up in Kerala, where The God of Small Things is set: the story of the twins Estha and Rahel and the forbidden love that breaks their family in 1969. It won the Booker Prize in 1997. She spent the next twenty years writing essays on dams, Kashmir and Indian politics before her second novel, and in 2024 Delhi's lieutenant governor approved her prosecution under India's anti-terror law over a 2010 speech on Kashmir. Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) is a memoir of her mother.

Every book by Arundhati Roy →

Amitav Ghosh

Indian · The Shadow Lines (1988), Sea of Poppies (2008), The Great Derangement (2016)

Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and trained as a social anthropologist at Oxford. The Shadow Lines, about a family spread between Calcutta, Dhaka and London and the riots of 1964, won the Sahitya Akademi Award. Sea of Poppies, the first novel of the Ibis trilogy about the opium trade, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 2018 he became the first English-language writer to receive India's Jnanpith Award.

Every book by Amitav Ghosh →

Orhan Pamuk

Turkish · My Name Is Red (1998), Snow (2002), The Museum of Innocence (2008)

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and has lived there almost all his life. My Name Is Red is a murder mystery among Ottoman miniaturists in 1591, told by many narrators, including a corpse, a coin and the colour red; Snow follows a poet in the border city of Kars among Islamists and secularists. In 2005 he was charged with “insulting Turkishness” over remarks about the killing of Armenians and Kurds; the charges were dropped, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

Zadie Smith

British · White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2005), The Fraud (2023)

Smith was born in north-west London in 1975 and began White Teeth while still at Cambridge. The novel follows two war veterans, the Englishman Archie Jones and the Bangladeshi Muslim Samad Iqbal, and their families in Willesden; Samad's son Millat demonstrates against The Satanic Verses in 1989. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. On Beauty won the Orange Prize in 2006.

Every book by Zadie Smith →

Kiran Desai

Indian · Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), The Inheritance of Loss (2006), The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)

Desai was born in Chandigarh in 1971, the daughter of the novelist Anita Desai, and moved to England and then the United States as a teenager. The Inheritance of Loss, set between a house in Kalimpong below Kanchenjunga and the kitchens of New York, won the Booker Prize in 2006. Nearly twenty years later The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. She is due to present Rushdie with his National Book Foundation medal in November 2026.