This is an incredibly difficult, yet compulsive thing to write. I had a terrible time and agonised over every writer I left out. I suspect it would have turned out entirely different if I’d written it just ten minutes later.
Here, in no particular order, are ten of the best writers I can think of right now.


Terry Pratchett - I just finished writing a review of him, so he’s right here, at the top of my mind. He writes funny, intelligent, ludicrous fantasy. So do a lot of other people, but he’s the best around.
Also in the same category are Tom Holt and Robert Rankin.

Franz Kafka - He’s a brilliant, surreal, frightening existentialist writer. Totally unique. Like a lot of other cool people, he died young of TB.
There is no one to compare him with.
Read The Trial, The Castle, America, and his short stories in Metamorphosis.

Douglas Adams - Best known for the Hitchhiker series. He is a bit like Terry Pratchett on science fiction. Much more individualistic, darker and bleaker, though.

JRR Tolkien - The man who made fantasy the most lucrative and imaginative genre. Book shops are overflowing with wannabes. His books sell better than them, though.
The man who inspired Led Zeppelin, and Blind Guardian, and lots of other metal bands..
I’d better stop eulogising, now.
Some of the best fantasy writers writing now are Stephen Donaldson, Michael Moorcock (if you listen to a band called Hawkwind, you’ve probably heard of him), and the long-winded Robert Jordan.

Aldous Huxley - . He began writing witty, spiky, satires of society, that culminated in Point Counter Point. Then he started on science and drugs-spiritualism. The Doors called themselves after his ’’The Doors of Perception’’ on his first experience with mescalin.
Point Counter Point, Brave New World, Island..

JD Salinger - He talks about grave and scary events in funny, weird, and demented ways. Read Catcher in the Rye.

PG Wodehouse - The god of humour. I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Colin Dexter - My current favourite detective story writer. His detective, Morse, makes every other detective look just a little bit artificial.

Umberto Eco - His fiction is learned, humourous, complicated, gripping, colourful and very, very clever. My favourite, Foucalt’s pendulum, combines bits of all kinds of myths and cults to come up with a frightening universal Plan.
You could also try The Name of the Rose.

Mervyn Peake - Like almost everyone else in this list, he writes comic fantasy. However, I find it impossible to club him with anyone else. His world is completely and brilliantly removed from anything you may have read or heard before. It is a dazed, extra-vivid, laughing, eerie world. Where Kafka twists the ordinary into the bizarre, Peake twists the bizarre to make it even more so.
The Gormenghast trilogy is staple (if one may use such a mundane word about him) fare for anyone who likes fantasy.

I’ve left out a lot of fantastic writers. They’ll survive. I’m sure a they’re in a lot of the other lists, anyway.