I suppose if you live in India, you don’t really have a need for horror fiction. You just go for a walk.
Stephen King for best known.
Most well regarded?
Margaret Atwood
Thomas Pynchon
Rohinton Mistry
Mark Helprin
Ian McEwan
Phillip Roth
I would add Cormac McCarthy to the list.
I guess I’m just used to it. Thailand is hardly alone in such matters.
Honestly, he’s not that big in most parts of Asia. I think my generation might know vaguely about him through Misery or maybe The Shining, but he is not even close to being as famous as Rowling. I honestly cannot think of a single foreign author, apart from Rowling, that would be immediately recognized by almost everyone under 60, at least in Korea.
Dan Brown is also pretty well known in Korea, though I don’t know about other parts of Asia.
King’s movies are big in Thailand. Thais love their horror flicks. As for Dan Brown, he’s only well known largely in the expat community. The details of his big Da Vinci Code epic were just too esoteric for most Thais to care about. The movie did okay in Bangkok but did not stay long, maybe a couple of weeks, and I’d wager most Thais who went to see the movie could not have told you Dan Brown’s name, they just knew this was a big movie in the West.
Seconded.
Agatha Christie? (Yes, I know she’s dead, but I thought this was an interesting tangent, maybe one for another thread…)
Julia Donaldson. Or more properly the Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler combo.
You find whole blocks of untranslated Latin accessible? I mean, I love the book, but it was a bit hard getting into it.
Her books are well-known (some of them, at least) but she isn’t. And I don’t know how well-known she is internationally. Dr Seuss is not that well-known in non English-speaking countries because his wordplay is difficult to translate. He’s also - just from personal experience, no stats - not as well known in the UK as the US.
There seriously is no author as well-known as Rowling. For well-regarded there’s a lot more room for argument, but that’s partly because it depends how you define the term.
Well-known is easily quantifiable by how many books an author has sold in how many languages, with a plus point of how much publicity the author gets, which is trickier to quantify. Rowling being a single Mum starting from very ordinary origins makes people notice her a bit more. I know my EFL classes aren’t a scientific cite, but she really is the only living author they’d all know, and I’ve had cause to test this multiple times.
Rowling has just outsold everybody, everywhere. I like her books, but did used to wonder if she had a deal with the devil or something because her level of success is so unusual.
King, brilliant as he is, does not come close. And some of the suggestions on here are actually kinda obscure outside the US.
SciFiSam writes:
> Rowling being a single Mum starting from very ordinary origins makes people
> notice her a bit more.
This description of her is at least a little bit deceptive (but it’s depressingly common, so I’m not complaining that you made it up). It sounds like she grew up in a slum, had her first illegitimate child at 15, and decided shortly after her tenth illegitimate child was born, having lived entirely on welfare up to then, that she should try writing a book. In fact, she grew up in a middle-class family, graduated from college, worked in the Amnesty International office in London, quit to take a job teaching English to adults in Portugal, married a Portuguese man, had a daughter, got divorced, and returned to the U.K. She was on welfare for a short time because she decided to write the book she had been thinking about. (She came up with the idea when she was about 25 and got it published at 32.) She finished the book while supported by an arts grant and the advance for the book. Meanwhile, she was working on her teaching certificate.
If you want to mention a way that she really had to struggle, you might mention that her first husband beat her.
Well, I suppose he is out of the running now.
Rain Soaked beat me to it, but yeah - we can’t include Tom Clancy in this thread anymore.
The bit about Thais mostly not reading is horrifying, and rightly so… But the truth is, most Americans don’t read, either. The sort of people who come to this message board, and especially this forum, aren’t a typical cross-section of humanity. Most people, despite being able to read functionally, don’t even begin to consider it a leisure activity in itself.
I said that she was from an ordinary background, not a poor one. You’re inferring things that were never implied.
I never implied that she was from a slum. A slum is not ordinary. Going to uni was free in her time (not just free, actually, but paid), and teaching English in another country is really common. Teaching post-grad degrees are still not only free, but paid. I’ve done all three and my background is definitely not privileged.
I also never said she had a load of kids as a teenager. I said she was a single Mum. Fair enough, I probably wouldn’t have mentioned that if she’d been a wealthy single Mum, but she wasn’t. Living in squalor, no, living on benefits, yes.
I think the ordinariness of her background, with a few challenges that many people we know encounter, appeals more than if she had been the strange picture of Victorian impoverishment you imagined I’d painted.
My, such lovely examples of the human condition. Our favourite author’s not liked in your country? Let’s point out how irrelevant and horrible a place it is. Thanks lads!
Most authors come from ordinary backgrounds by your standards. What was the point of even mentioning that she came from an ordinary background? There are lots of single mothers out there. In some places, the majority of mothers are single. Again, why even bother mentioning that she was a single mother? There is nothing in Rowling’s background that makes her untypical of the background that most authors come from.
I get really tired of these sorts of statements. Someone makes a statement about some situation in which they are vague enough that one could easily infer that something much more extreme than the true situation is the case. If no one questions that statement, the listeners will henceforth assume that the more extreme situation is true. If someone does question the statement, the person making the statement instead claims that obviously he didn’t mean the more extreme situation was the case.
There is nothing about the family background that Rowling came from or her finances at the time she was writing the first book of the series that sets her off from the situation of most authors just before getting their first book published. Barely scraping by is actually quite common for writers. If anything, the fact that she was beaten by her first husband was a much bigger obstacle for her than her living on welfare for a short period or taking care of a baby by herself.
We may not be world-class readers, but we’re not as bad as the description of the Thais. Even most people who hardly ever read still read something every now then, even if it’s just some mass craze book like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey or Harry Potter for that matter. This shows that about 80% of American adults in a survey said they had read some number of books in the past year, with a median of 8.
For children’s books, my own personal favorite is Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kids series. Unusual, terrific, and good movies.