The writers I really admire are just that – writers I really respect and enjoy….even venerate….I don’t want to be them. I like them for what they are, and the great lesson from all of them is that, as a writer, you have to be yourself, with your own voice and vision.
 
So here are, to my mind, six of the best:

1. Anthony Trollope
The real Trollope. Of all the Victorians, Anthony Trollope is the most profoundly psychological of novelists – and he was writing long before Freud!. His women are particularly good, especially when you think that marriage was the only career option for millions of them. If you haven’t been able to face one of his novels – they can be a bit enormous – try Miss Mackenzie, the story of an old maid (at 34!) who inherits some money…
 
2. Hilary Mantel
I loved her writing, long before the mega success of Wolf Hall. She wrote the best novel (bad title – A Place of Greater Safety) I ever read about the French Revolution, and some great modern ones – like Fludd and Eight Days on Gazzah Street. She isn’t just clever and original, she is also seriously funny, and I love that.
 
3. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi
Here’s a real find. A gorgeous (in every sense) young writer who makes modern stories sound  fresh but as if they come from ancient story tellers, at the same time – it’s something about the wonderful rhythms of her language. My favourite of hers is Half of a Yellow Sun but I loved Purple Hibiscus too. You can smell and feel Africa; you believe in these people – it’s not easy to create such a powerful reality, and she does it so well.
 
4. J.G. Farrell
He won the Lost Booker prize for Troubles and the real Booker – forever ago - for The Siege Of Krishnapur. I love the elegance of his writing, and the wit, and the sense of the absurd, and the way he can transport you to a whole crazy other world. He drowned, off the coast of Ireland, when he was only 44. A real loss.
 
5. Penelope Fitzgerald
Alas, dead too, but of old age. I had supper with her once, in the converted garage of her daughter’s house, where she was then living, and she was as warm and restrained and acute and beguiling as her books, of which my absolute favourite is The Blue Flower, the story of an extraordinary betrothal in eighteenth century Germany. If anyone needs a pattern of How To Write, Penelope Fitzgerald is IT.
 
6. Jeffrey Eugenides
He produces one amazing book every ten years or so…So over twenty years ago, it was The Virgin Suicides (brilliant) and about ten years ago, Middlesex (even better). He is that rare kind of writer who can make you believe, and make you laugh, and move you, and make you think, without apparently, seeming to do very much. I just love his stuff. I only wish he’d write a bit faster…

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