Top 10 Contemporary Authors

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Top 10 Contemporary Authors
From Mark Flanagan,
Your Guide to Literature: Contemporary.
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While it is impossible to rank the most important authors in contemporary
literature, here is a list of ten important (English language) authors with some
biographical notes and links to more information about them and their work.
1) Isabel Allende
Chilean-American author Isabel Allende wrote her debut novel, House of Spirits
to great acclaim in 1982. The novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather
and is a work of magical realism charting the history of Chile. Allende began
writing House of Spirits on January 8th, and subsequently has begun all her
books on that day.
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2) Margaret Atwood
Canadian author Margaret Atwood has numerous critically-acclaimed novels to her
credit, most recently Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad (2005). She is known for
her feminist themes, but her prolific output of work spans both form and genre.
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3) Jonathan Franzen
Winner of the National Book Award for his 2001 novel, The Corrections, and a
frequent contributor to The New Yorker magazine, Jonathan Franzen is also the
author of a 2002 books of essays entitled How to Be Alone and a 2006 memoir, The
Discomfort Zone.
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4) Ian McEwan
British writer Ian McEwan started winning literary awards with his first book,
First Love, Last Rites (1976) and never stopped. Atonement (2002) won several
awards and is being made into a movie, and Saturday (2005) won the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize.
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5) David Mitchell
English novelist David Mitchell is known for his tendency toward experimental
structure. In his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), he uses nine narrators to
tell the story and 2004's Cloud Atlas is a novel comprised of six interconnected
stories. Mitchell won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Ghostwritten, was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize for number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas, and is
on the Booker longlist for Black Swan Green (2006).
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6) Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) was named best novel of the past 25 years in a
2006 New York Times Book Review survey. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in
1988, and Toni Morrison, whose name has become synonymous with African American
literature, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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7) Haruki Murakami
Son of a Buddhist priest, Japanese author Haruki Murakami first struck a chord
with A Wild Sheep Chase in 1982, a novel steeped in the genre of magical realism
which he would make his own over the coming decades. Murakami's most popular
work among Westerners is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though 2005's Kafka on the
Shore met with success in this country, as well. The English version of
Murakami's most recent novel, After Dark, is slated for release in 2007.
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8) Philip Roth
Philip Roth seems to have won more book awards than any other American writer
alive. Most recently he won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The
Plot Against America (2005) and a PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement in
2006. In Everyman (2006), Roth's 27th novel, he sticks to one of his familiar
themes: what it's like growing old Jewish in America.
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9) Zadie Smith
Literary Critic James Wood coined the term "hysterical realism" in 2000 to
describe Zadie Smith's hugely successful debut novel, White Teeth, which Smith
agreed was a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to
be found in novels like my own White Teeth." Her third novel, On Beauty, was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
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10) John Updike
Terrorist (2006) is the most recent in the twenty-some novels John Updike has to
his credit. His four Rabbit Angstrom novels were named in 2006 among the best
novels of the past 25 years in a New York Times Book Review survey.