Favourite author and why?

[Enko]

A comment I made on my other current thread made me want to do this one.

Who is your favourite author and why?

Let's say no more than 2 to really make people think hard.

Mine are Astrid Lindgreen. For amazing stories and childhood memories and forever the Brothers Lionheart as a book of my youth..

Jean Auel. I just adore the way she wrote the earth children series. I read the first 3 in my late teens the had to wait a full year for the plains of passage to come out. I thought that was sooo long.. little did I know I then had a 12 year wait before Shelter of stone came out. And a further 10 for the land of the painted caves.

My favourite due to how she carries you away into this prehistoric world. Makes you. Sad happy angry for Ayla and later Jondolar. Just the most amazing writing.

What about everyone else?
(And the temptation to strike the 2 and name several others is sooooo hard)

Fiona Gibson jumps to mind just because the rom coms are so close to life!

P D James. Her prose; beautiful but sparing use of words that evoke, her minimalism in describing people and events, which just leaves me room to fill in my own ideas so that the characters can become more real. The levels of threat and unease that suddenly emerge in such ordinary situations.

Thomas Hardy - emotionally complex - deals with love, loss and the human condition. Anchored in a changing world where everything in society is shifting. Beautiful use of language and symbolism, as well as the representation of the natural world. Lots of strong, independent women who challenge traditional thinking - good advocate for the female of the species. And still totally resonant today in terms of cultural pressures and the search for understanding what it truly means to be human. He's epic.

Georgette Heyer. I have every one of hers in rotation. Witty, always a great final scene, nice to escape back 200 years. Also Catherine Alliott I've had some real spit-out-coffee hard laughs and I own all of hers hard copy as well - but it's tough to pick between her and Jilly Cooper...

I’m reading all of the old Mariyan Keyes books atm and I’d forgot how funny and heartwarming they are.
For nostalgia reasons I’ll go with Virgina Andrew’s, I loved her books as a teenager, especially the Flowers in The Attic series.

Elizabeth Gaskell. An author whose books resonate with goodness, Not a sentimental goodness, but stories that obviously come from an honest deeply loving person.

I do wish more of her tales were filmed. It seems to be Jane Austen over and over again.

Mine is Anne Tyler. I love how her books are not so much a story with a plot, more just a chunk of people's lives.
Her characters are flawed and interesting and real and no-one is painted as good or bad you can kind of see everyone's point of view.
I read her books over and over and find a new bit that is brilliant every time.

Dorothy L Sayers. Intelligent crime, witty, great characterisation, and wonderfully written with some great turns of phrase. Harriet Vane is one of the best fictional creations ever.

Maggie Shipstead and Lisa Taddeo for the way they depict the modern female condition with incredibly apt prose.

John Steinbeck - he writes about flawed people and broken dreams. I also really like Elizabeth Strout for the same reasons. Some of their stories are heart breaking.

Loving these and the reasons. Books are so personal.

Henry James. I sometimes wish I had a different answer, (for reasons) but his novels have honestly shaped my brain. I remember the transcendent effect of reading ‘The Golden Bowl’ and how I continued to live inside the story for months, in fact years afterwards. Even now, decades later, I sometimes long to be back in the moments of reading the first paragraphs and being held in the tension of the story’s unfolding. There are incidents of revelation in his books that … stop time. Like pulling back a curtain and discovering the real world behind the disguise. Vertiginous and terrifying. And his sentences take me to sheer ecstasy.

(But yes, @Ddakji, absolutely. In the real world I only ever want to exist as Harriet Vane.)

I would say Charles Dickens although that might make me sound like a pretentious arse. But it's true!

I just think Shakespeare - best dramatist
Dickens - best novelist

Have thought this as long as I can remember and haven't changed my opinion.

I love Dorothy L Sayers but in a completely different way.

I love Astrid Lindgren and The Bullerby Children. But I was pretty traumatised by The Brothers Lionheart. Brilliant read though and great for discovering your emotions as a child.

Colin Dexter for his Morse series of books. Beautifully written. Just sublime x

Oh yeah and why:

I just feel he conjures up such a plethora of fantastic characters, I love his humour and the descriptions of places. The stories. I don't know it sounds a bit rubbish when I try to explain.

Even though there's often huge sentimentality I find myself going along with it; it provokes my emotions.

The beginning of A Christmas Carol, with Scrooge going home and to bed is some of the best prose I've read.

The characters in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby are some of my favourites. Even though he's a villain you find yourself feeling such sympathy towards Ralph Nickleby by the end of the book.

Genius

Aldous Huxley. To me he was, and still is, the definition of intellectual brilliance and sophistication. I wanted to talk like the characters in his novels. In my early 20s, he was a door into another world. I grew up in suburban Essex, where people only ever talked about sport or cars or the weather. Huxley showed me a better world, a world of art and beauty and ideas. I loved Oscar Wilde for the same reason.

The other thing I loved about Huxley was the range of his interests. He was a polymath who knew his science as thoroughly as his literature and could, and did, write about everything. Just endlessly interesting.

A few honourable mentions would be P G Wodehouse (he didn’t write novels, he wrote beautiful prose poetry), Douglas Adams (if Wodehouse had written sci fi it would have been like this), and Evelyn Waugh (gorgeous prose and the only writer who is as funny as Wodehouse).

Louis de Bernieres

His prose is just sublime in my opinion. The scope and scale of his stories wows me. His ability to write the funniest lines that make me look like an absolute moron snorting out loud on the bus and on the next page the more spare, devastating sentence that makes me howl with ugly tears.

Jane Austen to me seems clearly the finest English-language fiction writer.

Virginia Andrews I've loved her books since I was a kid and still read them 😊 and Jackie Collins for the lucky books ❤️ I wish she was still alive to write more of them

Susan Fletcher. I can't exactly define why, because she is well outside my usual genre, but I find her writing has such a timeless quality. The Silver Dark Sea is possibly my all time favourite novel. It's so beautifully written, a book to savour. It draws you in, until you feel that you are part of that remote, island community, and facing life's adversities alongside them. Corrag/Witch Light is also a book to hold onto and revisit. One of the most haunting novels I have ever read, the story stayed with me for a long, long time. House of Glass is also a wonderful read. Although they are all very different in subject matter, they have the same lyrical, descriptive quality that I rarely find elsewhere. I've recommended this author to so many people, and received thanks for doing so. She's a wonderful (and underrated) writer.

Choosing a second name is more difficult because there are so many contenders...Do I go with old, classic, long established, or a young author who has penned a modern masterpiece? My main genre is fantasy but I'm trying to think outside that realm for this thread.

So, as this is about the writing, not the writer, or a single, precious volume, I'll go with Joanne Harris. I know she's a little controversial these days, but, giving consideration to the quality of writing, it has to be her. Chocolat and The Lollipop Shoes, in particular, still have a special magic for me.