- Count Leo Tolstoy – Nothing would stand in the way of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. If he had written these two books alone, he still would have been the greatest writer of all time. Yet he still added Resurrection, another masterpiece that led to a whole body of new followers and great short stories. I share his sentiments on Shakespeare's drama, it was awful! Whatever he wrote simply teems with greatness. Tell me that I am wrong.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky– There is something great about Russians and writing. Anyone who has read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov will agree with me that this man could write. And this despite his condition! His dramatic writing, and those scenes just blow me away!
- William Shakespeare – I place the bard here simply for the beauty of the more than one hundred and fifty sonnets. No other soul living or dead could have come up with such stuff.Shakespeare the poet was greater than anything that I have read in poetry. Forget Milton, forget Seamus Heaney. They don’t come close when it comes to poetry. Had he written drama without so much poetic influence where it wasn’t needed, he would have been my greatest.
- Charles Dickens – So far, and I stand challenged on this one; there isn’t a soul that can be half as humorous as Dickens. The witty characters he created come to life, jumping out of the texts to mingle with the common man. Nobody who has read the Great Expectations can forget Pip, and so are Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and many others. They have since become historical figures. He was a journalist, but he placed his skills to great use, a gift to readers world wide.
- Rabindranath Tagore – Now some people might never have heard of this great Indian writer. Bagging the 1913 Nobel Prize doesn’t say much about his ability to write music, for that is what his writing is. Great music. I have my free copy of the greatest of his writings, and the best known, Gitanjali. This is the soul that penned two national anthems, one for India, and another for Bangladesh!
- Patrick White – It doesn’t matter if this Australian was gay or not. The beauty of his prose would leave any lover of great literature slapping himself in excitement. Riders in a chariot, Eye of the Storm, Voss…What else can I say? Reading these works renewed the need in me to become the greatest writer of all time, it changed the way I view great writing.
- Gustave Flaubert – The Frenchman is well known for penning the beautiful Madame Bovary, and being a significant contributor to realism in literature, and for his creation, I can’t help but place him among the top ten writers of all time. Apart from Madame Bovary, I have checked his other major works: Salammbo, Simple soul....
- Miguel de Cervantes – Now, if the Spanish writer didn’t appear here, some readers would want to swallow me, all because of Don Quixote. He deserves his place on this list. This one great book influenced so many writers and propelled so many to this list.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez – If he wrote One hundred years of Solitude alone, and added nothing else, I would still place him in this position. I bet he won’t write anything better than this, never! The other books should also be checked out by any serious reader especially Love in the time of Cholera.
- Margaret Atwood – I love this old girl and I must say so. Where she gets the ideas for her works I can’t tell, but I would pay her to give me one or two. She is simply fantastic. I always wait with bated breath for her next work of fiction! Nothing in contemporary fiction compares to Oryx and Crake, Edible Woman, among others, I wish she were my grandmother!
- Salman Rushdie – He is here not because of controversy but because the complexity of what he conjures up. Literature students where I schooled could not finish reading Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. The two novels together with Shame, The Moor's Last Sigh, Grimus just excite me. He should win the nobel!
- Marcel Proust – The Frenchman’s A la recherché du temps perdu, translated into English as In Search of Lost Time must surely place him on this list. Why anyone should struggle with such a cycle of novels defeats me but it was such a great idea and it made him great and influential.
- Honore de Balzac – la comedie humaine. That is what Balzac is all about. He decided to rewrite all his major novels and novellas to form one story of human life in the Paris of those days, something that no one had thought of before. What an idea.
- D.H. Lawrence – Here is where you turn to when you want to feel inanimate objects teem with life. Lady Chatterley’s Lover kicked off a storm that lasted for decades, but this is not his only claim to eminence. Lawrence was great in so many aspects, though much of what he wrote smells so autobiographical! Check out Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, and write me a message.
- V.S. Naipaul – I haven’t read anything like A House for Mr. Biswas for a very long time. That is probably the best he could get. The others I have read by the same author from Miguel Street to In a Free State come a cropper. He surely has placed the caribbean island of Trinidad on the literary map.
- Goethe – He appears on this list on the strength of Faustus. Am yet to read his untranslated writings which i keep till the day l learn german.
- Ngugi Wa Thiong’o – This African writer appears on this list not because he is Kenyan, and not because I haven’t read any other but because all the rest of his age group from Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri lack the courage with which to confront the real issues affecting the black continent. the Wizard of the Crow sums up what he has been able to do for African literature.
- J.M. Coetzee – Why does he appear this far? He has won every major award that I can think of. I have read every major title that has come off his pen, but with Disgrace, he hit me as a different writer all together.
- Michael Ondaatje – I haven’t read anything else from him other than The English Patient. Somebody donate his other works to me please, I need to read him more, but the beauty of that one great piece earns him a place on list of the greatest twenty writers of all time.
- George Bernard Shaw – This Irish writer couldn’t miss this list for communicating so many ideas through his drama. He would have taught Shakespeare a thing or two about writing great plays.
Several writers do not appear on this list despite their fame and fortune, perhaps they should await my list of the worlds fifty greatest writers of all time. I still don’t know why Ian McEwan and Peter Carey are so much touted. They seem to write for the booker and not for their readers, but again this is my list. Gunter Grass wrote the Tin Drum, such a great piece of art, but he seems to have benefited from the Nazi atrocities. His other works have failed to touch me. Nurrudin Farah seems preoccupied with Somalia, his nation and nothing else. I rest my case.
// //