Image by Tony Lovell (2011)
My reading-lifetime’s Hall of Fame in no particular order:
Charles Dickens, Christopher Priest, AS Byatt, Enid Blyton, May Sinclair, HP Lovecraft, Barbara Vine, Reggie Oliver, Anita Brookner, WG Sebald, Jeremy Reed, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Bowen, Stephen King, Oliver Onions, Marcel Proust, Salman Rushdie, Glen Hirshberg, Paul Auster, Mark Valentine, John Fowles, Edgar Allan Poe, John Cowper Powys, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Jack Vance, Philip K Dick, Jeff VanderMeer, Samuel R Delany, Anthony Burgess, Susanna Clarke, Rhys Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, MR James, Robert Aickman, Sarban, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, Tommaso Landolfi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Quentin S. Crisp.
This is a list including writers I once considered in my Hall of Fame but now rarely read, and new writers whose works I read quite a lot and have included in my Hall of Fame fairly recently and variations upon that, but all have been major reading experiences some time in my life. Apologies to those I’ve inadvertently omitted because of my semi-Proustian memory.
Others either initially forgotten or bubbling at the the edge of the list (in no particular order): John Updike, John Howard, Ron Weighell, Gary McMahon, Gary Fry, Jason A. Wyckoff, Frances Oliver, Charles Schneider, Nick Jackson, PF Jeffery, Colin Insole, DP Watt, Mark Samuels, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Duffy, William Hope Hodgson, Peter Ackroyd, Patrick Hamilton, Eleanor Farjeon, Joel Lane, Clark Ashton Smith.
And Steve Rasnic Tem!
And Simon Kurt Unsworth!