And the Greatest Living British Writer is…
By John DeNardo |
Friday, June 9th, 2006 at
9:21 pm
JK Rowling!
So says a Book Magazine poll voted upon by readers.
As noted previously, Rowling was (yay us) one of the few genre authors who was nominated. At the time, I think the only other authors somehow connected with the genre were Terry Pratchett, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt and Kazuo Ishiguro. (See Andrew Wheeler’s originating post.) Now, it seems like votes were received for Iain M. Banks, Philip Pullman, Martin Amis, Neil Gaiman, J.G. Ballard, Diana Wynne Jones and Michael Moorcock.
[via BlogCritics, who now humorously questions the usefulness of Democracy.]
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Sheesh – if I’m a bit of a literary snob those folks over at BlogCritics are off the deep end. Folks in glass houses and all, probably should throw stones …
What, no Peter F. Hamilton??
Still, it’s indeed a very good start.
They should have separated Banks’ two aliases (If adding/dropping an “M.” can be considered an alias?), though. Not just because of the genre difference (The M. ones are the SF books, the M.-less ones aren’t), but because he really changes his writing style quite a lot between them. The first time I read an “Ian Banks” novel I was surprised by how different it was from what I expected. So it’s the same person, but even something as foolish-sounding as a quest for the greatest living British writer should consider those two writing-personas different.
And just for the record Salman Rushdie, 4th on the list, is as boring as hell (Well, more boring, depending on the specific version of hell). I tried going through The Satanic Verses once, and almost sympathized with the book-burning crowd.
Beyond that, though I’d be very wary of considering many of them as the best and greatest, the list in general seems pretty solid. At least as far as the names I do recognize go.