10 Favorite living writers

[Daniel del Real]

With the terrible loss of Antonio Tabucchi I realized he was definitely one of my favorite living writers. Really difficult to take him off the list but I got into the task of searching those ten names still kicking and whose books can make my days. In no particular order and with the number of books I've read from them between parenthesis:

• Amin Maalouf (4)
• Gabriel García Márquez (11)
• Haruki Murakami (12)
• Herta Müller (5)
• Ismail Kadaré (10)
• J.M. Coetzee (6)
• José Emilio Pacheco (6)
• Kenzaburo Oe (5)
• Mario Vargas Llosa (10)
• Orhan Pamuk (7)

[Rumpelstilzchen]

• Chris Ware
• Ben Katchor
• Cormac McCarthy
• Thomas Pynchon
• Herta Müller
• Günter Grass
• Marcel Beyer
• Laszlo Krasznahorkai
• Imre Kertesz
• Mircea Cartarescu (tentative, only 1 book read, orbitor trilogy upcoming)

Only just did not make it:

• Amos Oz

And with special mention:

• Shaun Tan

[JTolle]

• Don DeLillo
• Geoffrey Hill
• Anne Carson
• William H. Gass
• John Ashbery
• Gao Xingjian
• Milan Kundera
• Marilynne Robinson
• Ian McEwan
• Henri Cole

Very Anglo-centric, it occurs to me. And relatively heavy on the poets. Of Xingjian I've read only Soul Mountain and the beginning of One Man's Bible, but the former blew my mind, despite my reservations. I think back on it constantly.

[Eric]

Most of my favourite writers are dead.

[Liam]

Most of my favourite writers are dead.

Oh Eric. I love you, .

And as for the other three, hardly any women on your list(s), and I'm shocked that Danielle Steel didn't make the cut for Rumpy! Will come up with my own list later.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

and I'm shocked that Danielle Steel didn't make the cut for Rumpy! Will come up with my own list later.

I was sure that she would make it to your list and I did not want to give her too much attention

[Daniel del Real]

I was sure that she would make it to your list and I did not want to give her too much attention

I'm sure Liam is right now into the hype of Suzanne Collins and those Hunger Games

[Stiffelio]

It's hard to pick 10 truly great writers among the living, so whatever we can list now stands only as a second lot. The following are currently my favorites but I may decide to change that tomorrow. In alphabetical order:

César Aira
Martin Amis
Gabriel García-Márquez
Nadine Gordimer
Cormac McCarthy
Kenzaburo Oe
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
William Trevor
Mario Vargas-Llosa


Other writers whom I much enjoy reading but who did not make my top 10 list include: William Boyd, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Ismail Kadaré, Alice Munro and Haruki Murakami.

[Liam]

I'm overjoyed to see William Trevor on your list, Stiffy, but only a madman would refer to Martin Amis as a great writer. He's a good storyteller, but not a great writer.

[Stiffelio]

I'm overjoyed to see William Trevor on your list, Stiffy, but only a madman would refer to Martin Amis as a great writer. He's a good storyteller, but not a great writer.

You seem to have much authority commenting on other people's definition of greatness in writing. So I am now very curious as to what your own list is made of.

[Liam]

I call it the truth, .

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I call it the truth, .

Maybe you should read the heading of the thread... It is not about which writers we think the greatest but about our favorite writers, which is a completely different thing. Is that too difficult for you?

Btw. dear moderator, after 3 superflous posts of yours we are still waiting for the first constructive post on this thread by you, or at least relevent for the topic...

So for example, after having read like half a dozen books by Vargas Llosa I am convinced that he is a great writer, nevertheless for reasons of personal taste I would probably never put him on my top ten list of favorites.

[Eric]

Sorry, Rumple, but I would opine that people often think that great writers are their favourite ones and vice-versa. I don't believe that a Platonic ideal exists for genius in writing.

I must say I find Stiffelio's list rather puzzling with two pretentious magical realists plus one snooty British dopehead. And everyone seems to have a lot of Yanks. Is that because they are easier to access than many things in translation? The same people who berate the USA for neo-imperialism seem surprisingly interested in U.S. authors...

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Sorry, Rumple, but I would opine that people often think that great writers are their favourite ones and vice-versa. I don't believe that a Platonic ideal exists for genius in writing.

I can hate an author on basis of taste but nevertheless I can appreciate his writing abilities and influence, i.e. I can say that a writer is one of the most important ones of the century and not like him nevertheless and not put him anywhere close to my favorites. Or I can appreciate the new creative input graphic novelists are giving and consequentially count some of them among my favorite writers (Katchor, Ware) and at the same time realize that they are not artists on the level of <<put your greatest literary idol here>>. It is easy for me. That is what I wanted to say above.

One could additionally think about creating a thread on what people think are the 10 most influential living writers for example or the 10 most greatest living writers. For me at least, the emphasis would be shifted significantly in all of those cases. Don't you think?

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I must say I find Stiffelio's list rather puzzling with two pretentious magical realists plus one snooty British dopehead. And everyone seems to have a lot of Yanks. Is that because they are easier to access than many things in translation? The same people who berate the USA for neo-imperialism seem surprisingly interested in U.S. authors...

Well, JTolle is from the US, so it is not surprising that he favours English writing authors. I for myself was also wondering why I have so many US writers on my list on the one hand and so many central European ones on the other hand. It is not that I do not read books from other regions. If you understand several languages it is not difficult to access translations that you can understand. So what is the reason? I don't know. Of course, I can read US and German writers in their original language. I guess part of the greatness gets lost in translation, so this might help explaining. Stiffelio's list and Daniel's to an even larger extend have a strong international touch. I like that.

[Caodang]

My 10 favourite living writers:
1) Laszlo Krasznahorkai
I have read only his "Melancholy of resistance" and "War and War", yet these are ways far enough for him to enter my list.
2) Haruki Murakami
His "Wind-up bird chronicle" and "Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world" are simply superb. The same can hardly be said of his other books (to me), yet it's not important.
3) G. G. Marquez
I absolutely love his "Cien anos de soledad". His other novels less so, yet it's not important.
4) J.M. Coetzee
I deeply admire his "Waiting for the barbarians" and "Life and time of Michael K".
5) Kenzaburo Oe
His ability to transcend his personal tragedy/trauma, turning it into something uplifting and universal, is simply amazing.
6) Orhan Pamuk
His novels, "My name is Red" and "Snow", and his non-fiction books, "Other colours" and "Istanbul".
The remaining four are a bit more difficult to choose, I feel I haven't read enough for them to decide, only I have a feeling they are among the authors I'll return to in the future. These include (in the brackets are the only book by each of them that I've read:
7) Enrique Vila-Matas (Bartleby & Co)
8) Goncalo Tavares (Jerusalem)
9) Ismael Kadare (The Ghost rider)
10) Cesar Aira(Ghosts).

On the other hand, quite a few of other brilliant writers are "competing" for one of these last 4 positions (for example, Victor Pelevin (Buddha's little finger), Andrei Makine (The French testament)), which makes the situation even trickier, not to take into account several other writers I heard a lot of but whose books I have yet to be able to get into my hands (Mircea Cartarescu, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Kim Young-ha, etc). All this means my list can well be changed shortly.

It'd be a lot easier if I were to draw a list of my ten favourite writers (no matter whether they're living or dead)

[JTolle]

To be honest, I read plenty of foreign literature, but those from whom I've read enough to warrant "favorite"-status are very much dead. (Almost put Roberto Bolaño on 'cause I blanked for a second.) But otherwise Eugenio Montale, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, and Vasily Rozanov would all have made my list ahead of writers like McEwan or Cole, much as I like them.

[Worldeater]

This is hard, most of my favorites are dead so here's top 3:

Mirko Kovač
Dubravka Ugrešić
Vladimir Voinovich

[Rumpelstilzchen]

This is hard, most of my favorites are dead so here's top 3:

Mirko Kovač
Dubravka Ugrešić
Vladimir Voinovich

Hey Worldeater, maybe you have said it already somewhere, so please excuse me in that case, but what's your native language and which languages are you familiar with?

[Stevie B]

A good friend of mine introduced me to Coetzee's work many years ago. He suggested The Life and Times of Michael K, and said it was one of the few books that actually made him cry. I later read the novel and was moved in parts, but remained dry-eyed from cover to cover. Perhaps I'm just a cold-hearted bastard.