About the Author: Initial Research

These are some initial notes on the key features of all the authors on the list that I've made in order to try and narrow down which authors I would like to focus on.

Italo Calvino – Italian writer, short stories and novels. Fairy tale esque writing style, sometimes more realistic

Douglas Adams – most well known for hitchhikers guide to the galaxy trilogy, whimsical and non sensical writing style

Donna tartt – neo-romanticism inflected prose borrowing from the style of nineteenth century literature

Franz kafka – one of the major figures in 20^th century writing, characters often face surreal predicaments, well known for metamorphosis

Samuel beckett – wrote in English and French, books are quite bleak and involve black comedy

Agatha Christie – crime novelist, best selling novelist of all time

Aldous Huxley – best known for Brave New World (set in a dystopian future), and other non fiction works. Also wrote short stories and poetry

Edgar Allan Poe – poetry and short stories. His books focus on mystery and the macabre, credited with contributions to the science fiction genre

Shakespeare – English poet and playwright, mainly wrote tragedies and then later on in his career wrote tragedies that were also comedies

Margaret Atwood – novels, poems, short stories. Most well known for novels. Feminism is a strong theme within her work

Cormac Mccarthy – gothic, western and post-apocalyptic novels, 10 novels, some short fiction

Lin Yutang – chinese writer, inventor, linguist and translator. Witty and wise populiser of chinese philosophy

Naomi Klein – author and filmmaker. Books centre around globalization and capitalism

Susan Sontag – writer, filmmaker, political activist. Wrote about areas of conflict and struggles in the world

Haruki Murakami – Japanese writer, considered one of the most greatest living novelists. Work carries themes of melancholy and surrealism. Well known for 1Q84

Carl Sagan – astronomer, astrophysicist. Known for his research into extra terrestrial life. Assembled the first physical messages to be sent into space

Harper Lee – most well-known for To Kill A Mockingbird

Wole Soyinka – Nigerian poet and playwright. Politically active. Work often was about "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it"

Toni Morrison – novelist, editor, teacher. Works predominantly centre around race and feminism

George Orwell – most well known for 1984 (dystopian novel) and animal farm. Works focus on social injustice. Orwell opposed totalitarianism and supported democratic socialism

William Burroughs – big influence of the beat generation, work is semi-autobiographical, featuring subjects such as heroin addiction and his travels

Malcolm Gladwell – writes about social sciences

Leonora Carrington – Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist. Focused on femininity and sexuality

Angela Carter – known for feminist, magical realism and picaresque writings

Oliver Sacks – neurologist, naturalist, historian of science and author. Published books on neurological disorders

Rachel Carson – author, marine biologist and conservationist. Work was focused around marine life and the environmental movement

Ray Bradbury – sci-fi, horror, fantasy and mystery novels. Well known for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles

Ursula LeGuin – sci-fi and fantasy novels. Also wrote childrens books and short stories. She has been described as the greatest living science fiction writer by The New York Times

There are quite a few authors that have interested me from this list. I have already read work by Douglas Adams, Haruki Murakami and George Orwell. I enjoyed all of them but I think I should perhaps try and focus on authors that I’m not as familiar with because this will be more exciting to explore and base my illustrations on. Although I love the stories written by Haruki Murakami, I find his writing style overly poetic and melancholic so I won’t be exploring his work further. I have only read half of animal farm which I really enjoyed so George Orwell is an author I might explore further, because I find some of the underlying political points in his books really interesting and very relevant to the world today.

I really enjoy science fiction and dystopian novels, so the other authors I am going to research further before I chose my three authors are Aldous Huxley, Cormac McCarthy, Carl Sagan (for his work on extra-terrestrial life), Ray Bradbury and Ursula LeGuin.

The other authors I am interested in are William Burroughs – I did a project on the Beat Generation for a project during my foundation and while I am familiar with the beatniks on a whole, I haven’t read much beat literature apart from On the Road by Kerouac. I find the Beat Generation and the subjects they explore really interesting though, so Burroughs is someone I will potentially research further.

There are a few more authors that I am going to look into a bit more and maybe read excerpts of their work before I make up my mind, but I think that these are the main authors I am going to look into.