The 100 Most Influential Authors of the 20th Century
Some lists rank. This one doesn't. These one hundred writers were chosen because their work travelled, because readers found them and kept finding them, across borders, languages, and generations. Nobel laureates sit alongside genre pioneers, voices of political exile alongside architects of popular fiction. What they share is reach, and the kind of staying power that makes their books worth owning in any form.
The list is deliberately broad. It draws from every continent and dozens of literary traditions, and it resists the idea that influence belongs only to the canonised or the critically approved. A book that has been pressed into a stranger's hands a million times has earned its place here.
Where we have individual pages for an author, you'll find a link to their full profile and any signed first editions currently available. For the rest, click the name to explore signed copies directly.
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Chinua Achebe
- Sherman Alexie
- Isabel Allende
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Maya Angelou
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Isaac Asimov
- Paul Auster
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Margaret Atwood
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James Baldwin
- Toni Cade Bambara
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Julian Barnes
- Samuel Beckett
- Saul Bellow
- Heinrich Böll
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Octavia E. Butler
- Italo Calvino
- Angela Carter
- Raymond Carver
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Arthur C. Clarke
- Paulo Coelho
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Don DeLillo
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Philip K. Dick
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Joan Didion
- Michael Dorris
- Umberto Eco
- Ralph Ellison
- T. S. Eliot
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Louise Erdrich
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Sebastian Faulks
- William Faulkner
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Ken Follett
- Michel Foucault
- Neil Gaiman
- Khalil Gibran
- Gabriel García Márquez
- Graham Greene
- Günter Grass
- Ernest Hemingway
- Zora Neale Hurston
- Aldous Huxley
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Kazuo Ishiguro
- James Joyce
- Franz Kafka
- Jack Kerouac
- Barbara Kingsolver
- Milan Kundera
- Hanif Kureishi
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Jhumpa Lahiri
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Ursula K. Le Guin
- Doris Lessing
- C. S. Lewis
- Clarice Lispector
- Jack London
- Naguib Mahfouz
- Katherine Mansfield
- Thomas Mann
- Carson McCullers
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Ian McEwan
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Cormac McCarthy
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Toni Morrison
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Haruki Murakami
- Vladimir Nabokov
- V. S. Naipaul
- Flannery O'Connor
- Michael Ondaatje
- George Orwell
- Amos Oz
- Ann Patchett
- Orhan Pamuk
- Sylvia Plath
- Terry Pratchett
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Annie Proulx
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Thomas Pynchon
- Philip Roth
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J. K. Rowling
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Arundhati Roy
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Salman Rushdie
- J. D. Salinger
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José Saramago
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Marjane Satrapi
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Zadie Smith
- Muriel Spark
- Wole Soyinka
- John Steinbeck
- Jeanette Winterson
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- Simone de Beauvoir
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Colm Tóibín
- J. R. R. Tolkien
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John Updike
- Mario Vargas Llosa
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Alice Walker
- Patrick White
- Richard Wright
- Virginia Woolf
- Richard Yates
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- Stefan Zweig
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