OPINION - favourite authors.

Who are your favourite authors? Teaching English makes this question a particular minefield – one that I dance around carefully and with a full awareness of context: too dry and you’ll scare off students or, worse still, sound like a liar; too light and you’ll sound flaky and, dear God no, a bit low brow.

There are a number of authors I circle around, every so often one repeats him/herself too much and drifts out and another finds their way in.
 

Cormac McCarthy – anything he writes has got me, certainly for the time being. Maybe, in part, because he embraces genre storytelling and then finds something rich and interesting to do with it, but also because his control of prose is so damn good. I challenge anyone to find a single word they would change in The Road or No Country for Old Men. They were superb films, the Coen brothers doing especially well, but the quality come from the texts.

George R R Martin – so much has been written on his works at the moment that it is difficult to add much of note. If you’re cautious about the label ‘fantasy’ then probably there isn’t a lot I can say that would change your mind, still, take my word for it; you’re missing out on well-formed characters from an author with a real mastery of narrative.

Clive Barker – Is an author often unfairly bracketed because he writes adult stories that, at times, require a strong stomach to get through. That said, ever since I discovered him in my early teens, I’ve kept returning to his short-story writing in moments of creative lapse. A walk in his footsteps, even for a little while, is enough to set me right.

Alex Garland – I love his scriptwriting but I keep getting drawn back to The Beach and the Tesseract. They are wonderful novels that, for an aspiring writer, really show how you can translate your own experiences into a fiction environment.

Peter Carey – having taught True History of the Kelly Gang for a number of years, and returned to Oscar and Lucinda in my own time, there is something wonderfully controlled in the way he approaches his topic. Exploring the language of his characters is particularly interesting and his work is something I always point students towards to understand how you can convey characters through the way they talk rather than what they say.
 

There are more, but these are the ones that leap to the front and, over the next few weeks, between offering stories from my own collections, I will be looking to discuss their works a little more.