Fifteen writers

[altariel]

The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors who’ve influenced you and will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Consider yourself tagged if you want to be tagged.

Here are my fifteen. I've taken ‘authors’ to include novelists, poets, and non-fiction writers. You don't necessarily have to, though.

• Jane Austen: Again and again you go back – to all the books – and you’re delighted and awed. I like Persuasion best, although Mansfield Park has absorbed me most.


• Chris Boucher: Instilled in me at a very early age a deep of love of awesome dialogue. And then broke my heart.


• TS Eliot: My head pops and fizzes when I read Eliot. Yes, this is what words should do.


• Sylvia Engdahl: Her two YA novels (Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil) gave me a girl lead and first made me think sociologically.


• Hans-Georg Gadamer: He made me think about truth. And method. And helped me understand how I understand the world.


• Emma Goldman: She’s fabulous and right.


• Isabeau of Greenlea: Dear partner-in-crime.


• Tove Jansson: Moomins! Melancholy! Tiny anarchists! And her grown-up stuff turns out to be brilliant too.


• Brendan Kennelly: Poet of varied vernacular voices.


• John Le Carré: Secretly I want to write books like these when I grow up.


• Ursula Le Guin: Opened world upon world for me. Courage and encouragement.


• Francine Prose: This is mostly for her inspirational book on writing, Reading Like A Writer, although I’ve liked the handful of her novels I've read too.


• Marilynne Robinson: Sentence for sentence probably the best prose I’ve read.


• Gitta Sereny: Brilliant biographer of Albert Speer and nemesis of David Irving. Deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.


• JRR Tolkien: The lens through which I read the world. Best beloved.

Comments

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Fascinating list. I don't often pick up tags or challenges, but I may well do this one. I made sure to make a list before I read yours and surprised myself with the names on it, which I guess is the point of things like this, that they make you think about yourself and your personal world.

I can only really comment on Tolkien, whom I first read at age 6, or possibly younger because that was my 1st attempt at LoTR, and on Austen, who is a craving like chocolate but, surprisingly, hasn't actually made my list. Boucher, of course, I've enjoyed without really being aware of - which may or may not be a compliment. ;)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Tolkien and Austen seem to be making most lists! (And Le Guin.) Did you post your list? I don't think I saw it.