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IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE |
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IN THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE |
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| The editors of The Norwegian Book Clubs asked 100 prominent authors to nominate ten books that, in their opinion, are the ten best and most central works in world literature: These are books that have had a decisive impact on the cultural history of the world and also left an individual mark on the authors own thinking and imagination. John Irving, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, Carlos Fuentes, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Auster, A.S. Byatt, Ben Okri, Orhan Pamuk, Fay Weldon, Wole Soyinka, Bei Dao, Nawal El Saadawi, Yvonne Vera, Astrid Lindgren, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Norman Mailer... - and 80 other prominent authors attended the election. The results as released in May 2002, showed Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote as the first choice of the author's polled. The 100 titles that gathered most votes are listed alphabetically in the table below. |
| Chinua Achebe | Nigeria | b. 1930 | Things Fall Apart |
| Hans Christian Andersen | Denmark | 1805-1875 | Fairy Tales and Stories |
| Jane Austen | England | 17745-1817 | Pride and Prejudice |
| Honore de Balzac | France | 1799-1850 | Old Goriot |
| Samuel Beckett | Ireland | 1906-1989 | Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable |
| Giovanni Boccaccio | Italy | 1313-1375 | Decameron |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Argentina | 1899-1986 | Collected Fictions |
| Emily Bronte | England | 1818-1848 | Wuthering Heights |
| Albert Camus | France | 1913-1960 | The Stranger |
| Paul Celan | Romania/France | 1920-1970 | Poems |
| Louis-Ferdinand Celine | France | 1894-1961 | Journey to the End of Night |
| Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra | Spain | 1747-1616 | Don Quixote |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | England | 1340-1400 | Canterbury Tales |
| Joseph Conrad | England | 1857-1924 | Nostromo |
| Dante Alighieri | Italy | 1265-1321 | The Divine Comedy |
| Charles Dickens | England | 1812-1870 | Great Expectations |
| Denis Diderot | France | 1713-1784 | Jacques the Fatalist and His Master |
| Alfred Doblin | Germany | 1878-1957 | Berlin Alexanderplatz |
| Fyodor M. Dostoevsky | Russia | 1821-1881 | Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov |
| George Eliot | England | 1819-1880 | Middlemarch |
| Ralph Ellison | United States | 1914-1994 | Invisible Man |
| Euripides | Greece | c480-406 BC | Medea |
| William Faulkner | United States | 1897-1962 | Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury |
| Gustave Flaubert | France | 1821-1880 | Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education |
| Federico Garcia Lorca | Spain | 1898-1936 | Gypsy Ballads |
| Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Columbia | b. 1928 | One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera |
| Gilgamesh | Mesopotamia | c 1800 BC | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Germany | 1749-1832 | Faust |
| Nikolai Gogol | Russia | 1809-1852 | Dead Souls |
| Gunter Grass | Germany | b. 1927 | The Tin Drum |
| Joao Guimaraes Rosa | Brazil | 1880-1967 | The Devil to Pay in the Backlands |
| Knut Hamsun | Norway | 1859-1952 | Hunger |
| Ernest Hemingway | United States | 1899-1961 | The Old Man and the Sea |
| Homer | Greece | c 700 BC | The Iliad and The Odyssey |
| Henrik Ibsen | Norway | 1828-1906 | A Doll's House |
| The Book of Job | Israel | 600-400 BC | |
| James Joyce | Ireland | 1882-1941 | Ulysses |
| Franz Kafka | Bohemia | 1883-1924 | The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle |
| Kalidasa | India | c 400 | The Recognition of Sakuntala |
| Yasnuri Kawabata | Japan | 1899-1972 | The Spund of the Mountain |
| Nikos Kazantzakis | Greece | 1883-1957 | Zorba the Greek |
| D.H. Lawrence | England | 1885-1930 | Sons and Lovers |
| Halldor K. Laxness | Iceland | 1902-1998 | Independent People |
| Giacomo Leopardi | Italy | 1798-1837 | Complete Poems |
| Doris Lessing | England | b. 1919 | The Golden Notebook |
| Astrid Lindgren | Sweden | 1907-2002 | Pippi Longstocking |
| Lu Xun | China | 1881-1936 | Diary of a Madman and Other Stories |
| Mahabharata | India | c 500 BC | |
| Naguib Mahfouz | Egypt | b. 1911 | Children of Gebelawi |
| Thomas Mann | Germany | 1875-1955 | Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain |
| Herman Melville | United States | 1819-1891 | Moby Dick |
| Michel de Montaigne | France | 1533-1592 | Essays |
| Elsa Morante | France | 1918-1985 | History |
| Toni Morrison | United States | b. 1931 | Beloved |
| Shikibu Murasaki | Japan | c 1011 | The Tale of Genji |
| Robert Musil | Austria | 1880-1942 | The Man Without Qualities |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Russia/USA | 1899-1977 | Lolita |
| Njals Saga | Iceland | c 1300 | |
| George Orwell | England | 1903-1950 | 1984 |
| Ovid | Italy | 43 B.C.- 17AD | Metamorphoses |
| Fernando Pessoa | Portugal | 1888-1935 | The Book of Disquiet |
| Edgar Allan Poe | United States | 1809-1849 | The Complete Tales |
| Marcel Proust | France | 1871-1922 | Remembrance of Things Past |
| Francois Rabelais | France | 1495-1553 | Gargantua and Pantagruel |
| Juan Rulfo | Mexico | 1918-1986 | Pedro Paramo |
| Jalal ad-din Rumi | Iran | 1207-1273 | Mathnawi (Daylight) |
| Salman Rushdie | India/England | b. 1947 | Midnight's Children |
| Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi | Iran | c 1200-1292 | The Orchard |
| Tayeb Salih | Sudan | b. 1929 | Seasons of Migration to the North |
| Jose Saramago | Portugal | b. 1922 | Blindness |
| William Shakespeare | England | 1564-1616 | Hamlet; King Lear; Othello |
| Sophocles | Greece | 496-406 B.C. | Oedipus the King |
| Stendhal | France | 1783-1842 | The Red and the Black |
| Laurence Sterne | Ireland | 1713-1768 | The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy |
| Italo Svevo | Italy | 1861-1928 | Confessions of Zeno |
| Jonathan Swift | Ireland | 1667-1745 | Gulliver's Travels |
| Leo Tolstoy | Russia | 1828-1910 | War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories |
| Anton P. Chekhov | Russia | 1860-1904 | Selected Stories |
| Thousand and One Nights | India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt | 700-1500 | |
| Mark Twain | United States | 1835-1910 | The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn |
| Valmiki | India | c 300 BC | Ramayana |
| Vergil | Italy | 70-19 BC | The Aeneid |
| Walt Whitman | United States | 1819-1892 | Leaves of Grass |
| Virginia Woolf | England | 1882-1941 | Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse |
| Marguerite Yourcenar | France | 1903-1987 | Memoirs of Hadrian |
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