The World’s Greatest Writer

It isn’t as easy as declaring the world’s fastest man, that is obviously Usain Bolt. It isn’t easier like recognizing the world’s greatest terrorist, arguably Osama bin Laden. Who is the world’s greatest writer living or dead? Who is that great soul whose writing stands out from among the crowd? Who is that great soul that has contributed so immensely to the world’s social, economic or political development? So many writers have come and gone, so many have written great literature, works that stand out from the rest of the pack and have really transformed the world, but who really is the greatest among them?

Of the pre Nobel Prize writers, could it be William Shakespeare or John Milton? Could it be Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky? What about Dante Alighieri, Voltaire, Ivan Turgenev Nikolai Gogol, or even Karl Marx? What about Gustave Flaubert and Honore de Balzac? Where do these souls stand?

The Nobel Prize has been awarded more than one hundred and one times, and each time, a truly great writer has bagged it. Sometimes for political reasons, but most of the time, it has been due to great contribution to the field of writing and literature as a whole. Nobody can discount the eminence of Poland’s epic writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, Anglo-Indian poet and playwright, Rudyard Kipling, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Patrick White, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the German Günter Grass. These individuals have written at least one great piece upon which their eminence has been based. For example, nobody else would have written One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Tin Drum but their authors. This is great literature and must be celebrated.

Some have never won the Nobel, and like Tolstoy before them, they might never win despite their greatness. They surely stand head and shoulders above their peers. I have in mind authors who have won the other major titles particularly the man booker prize. Look at Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Iris Murdoch, Ian McEwen, James Maxwell Coetzee, among others. These are more than good writers for more than one reason, but the one reason is how and what they have published. Who is the greatest among these writers?