Here's a list of my thirty favorite prose writers of all time. These are the authors that I keep returning to over the years, the ones who have written many novels or short stories that have captured my imagination. Some are widely recognized; others are more personal choices. Some are more highbrow; others excelled in lighter genres. They're arranged by language and chronology.
**English (U.K.)**
* Jane Austen * Charles Dickens * Thomas Hardy * Arthur Conan Doyle * Agatha Christie * Graham Greene * Roald Dahl * Doris Lessing
**English (U.S.A.)**
* Edgar Allan Poe * Henry James
**French:**
* Victor Hugo * Jules Verne * Émile Zola * Guy de Maupassant * Amélie Nothomb
**German:**
* Hermann Hesse * Thomas Mann * Juli Zeh
**Spanish:**
* Gabriel García Márquez * Mario Vargas Llosa * Isabel Allende
**Russian:**
* Fyodor Dostoevsky * Leo Tolstoy * Anton Chekhov
**Dutch:**
* Harry Mulisch * Louis Paul Boon
**Other languages:**
* Astrid Lindgren (Swedish) * Milan Kundera (Czech) * Orhan Pamuk (Turkish) * Haruki Murakami (Japanese)