Fiction

Book Riot Readers’ Favorite Living Writers

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
  4. Margaret Atwood
  5. John Green
  6. Haruki Murakami
  7. Cormac McCarthy
  8. John Irving
  9. George R.R. Martin
  10. Barbara Kingsolver
  11. Toni Morrison
  12. Chuck Palahniuk
  13. Michael Chabon
  14. David Mitchell
  15. Zadie Smith
  16. Terry Pratchett
  17. David Sedaris
  18. Anne Rice
  19. Diana Gabaldon
  20. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  21. Ian McEwan
  22. Paul Auster
  23. Alice Munro
  24. Markus Zusak
  25. Pat Conroy
  26. Richard Russo
  27. Hilary Mantel
  28. Jim Butcher
  29. Louise Erdrich
  30. Philip Roth
  31. Thomas Pynchon
  32. Ursula K. LeGuin
  33. Jasper Fforde
  34. Joe Hill
  35. Jonathan Lethem
  36. Jonathan Safran Foer
  37. Lorrie Moore
  38. Robert Crais
  39. Tana French
  40. Anne Tyler
  41. Don DeLillo
  42. George Saunders
  43. Jeanette Winterson
  44. Kazuo Ishiguro
  45. 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?