Fiction

Book Riot Readers’ Favorite Living Writers

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

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A couple weeks ago, Jeff asked you to name your favorite living writer. And because he’s nice and knows how hard it is to name just one, he let you pick three! 578 readers took the poll (that’s a tiny portion of the Book Riot community, but we think it’s a decent sample size) and named 551 different authors. Here are the top 45 responses! Did your favorite make the list?

  1. Neil Gaiman (69 votes)
  2. Stephen King
  3. J.K. Rowling
  • Margaret Atwood
  • John Green
  • Haruki Murakami
  • Cormac McCarthy
  • John Irving
  • George R.R. Martin
  • Barbara Kingsolver
  • Toni Morrison
  • Chuck Palahniuk
  • Michael Chabon
  • David Mitchell
  • Zadie Smith
  • Terry Pratchett
  • David Sedaris
  • Anne Rice
  • Diana Gabaldon
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Ian McEwan
  • Paul Auster
  • Alice Munro
  • Markus Zusak
  • Pat Conroy
  • Richard Russo
  • Hilary Mantel
  • Jim Butcher
  • Louise Erdrich
  • Philip Roth
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Jasper Fforde
  • Joe Hill
  • Jonathan Lethem
  • Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Lorrie Moore
  • Robert Crais
  • Tana French
  • Anne Tyler
  • Don DeLillo
  • George Saunders
  • Jeanette Winterson
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Sherman Alexie (7 votes)

    See the full list of authors and the number of times they were mentioned.

    We’ll back with commentary on the list soon. What do you make of it?