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The Times announces the two greatest living authors - Virago authors both!

Happy New Year! I've just got back to work to discover a really wonderful article in yesterday's Sunday Times - what a fantastic start to 2008!

If one asks who are the great living novelists, most people would vote for men - John Updike, Philip Roth, and perhaps DeLillo. Bryan Appleyard says that this is oppressive, and announced 'with total confidence that the two greatest living novelists are women: Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard.' Robinson's novels are 'shattering, as psychologically profound as they are morally serious'. As for Hazzard, 'The Transit of Venus, according to one of my advisers, is "the most perfect novel written in the past 100 years". I have just read it, and he may well be right. The Great Fire runs it pretty close; in fact, everything she writes is suffused with extraordinary beauty and almost unbearable insight. She is the greatest of all writers on love.'
 
He ends the article by saying, 'Both Robinson and Hazzard have had their awards and successes, but both are quiet, unhyped and deadly serious.  And they're not men.'
 
Read the full article in The Times.
 
Virago publishes Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Her new novel, Home, will be published in September. Virago publishes by Shirley Hazzard: People in Glass Houses, The Great Fire, Cliffs of Fall, Greene on Capri, The Bay of Noon, The Evening of the Holiday and The Transit of Venus.
 
So make a belated New Year's resolution and in 2008 discover the two greatest living novelists.

Posted 02/01/2008 11:57:34 by Donna Coonan, Commissioning Editor, Virago Modern Classics with 0 comments.

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