Almost any writer worth his salts was a reader first. The voices of each of your inspirations comes through in your work to the extent that I kept finding traces of Enid Blyton when I wrote my first book. Pretty scary but understandable when I remember how much the Secret Seven and the Magic Faraway Tree meant to me when I was young.

So here's a variety of writers that inspired me to pick up the pen.

Children's Writers

Antoine de Saint Exupery - The Little Prince

Roald Dahl - The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, the Witches, Boy, Going Solo and more.

Philip Pullman - The Amber Glass Trilogy

Richmal Crompton - The Just William series

 

Fiction

 

Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion

Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment, The Devils

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, War and Peace, Resurrection

Maupassant - Short Stories

Johnathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels

J.D Salinger - Catcher in the Rye, 9 Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Franny and Zooey

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in Time of Cholera

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings

John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids, The Chysalids

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mocking Bird

Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana, The Quiet American

Hunter Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Herman Hesse - Siddharta

Non-Fiction

 

Michael Herr - Dispatches

Henrie de Charriere - Papillon

Henrie de Monfreid - Hashish

Knut Hamsun - Hunger

George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

Jack Kerouac - On the Road

Robin Brown - Deccan Tamasha, Further Up the Road

The Samurai of Vishogrod

Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar, Black Star Safari

 

Comics

Asterix and Obelix

Bll Watterson - Calvin and Hobbes

Neil Gaiman - The Sandman series

Poetry and Song Writers Rumi

William Blake - Visionary English poet and mystic

Allen Ginsburg

Tom Waits

Bob Dylan

Leonard Cohen

Beth Gibbons

 

Journalism

Arundhati Roy  

Noam Chomsky