Hay festival:

The joys of discovering new authors

From exciting new talents to foreign writers unknown in Britain, there's plenty of excitement if you're prepared to step into the unknown

Source: Guardian


Something that I've heard over and over again from the people who come to the Hay festival is how much they love reading new authors. They come to find Salman Rushdie, or Fay Weldon and they've wound up hearing unknown new writers like Arundhati Roy, DBC Pierre and Yann Martel ...

So this year, to celebrate 21 years of the Hay festival, we've found 21 of the most exciting new voices in fiction. You can come and meet them at the festival, or read some of their work online. There's Ross Raisin, whose debut weaves a paranoid fantasy out of Yorkshire dialect and invented slang. There's Tom Rob Smith, whose story of a serial killer in Stalin's Russia set off a bidding war at the London Book Fair and was snapped up for a film adaptation by Ridley Scott. There's Jenny Valentine, who won the Guardian children's fiction prize with her debut and has followed it up with another cracker. And there are many more.

Not all of these new voices are debutants, some are already huge stars in other countries, or in other languages, and will be familiar names for some readers of this blog. Zhu Wen revolutionised Chinese literature back in 1994 with his bleak vision of a society torn between cut-throat capitalism and Communist platitudes. He's almost completely unknown over here. Or look at Jhumpa Lahiri in the US, who sells over a million copies of every book she publishes, or Michelle de Kretser in New Zealand, or Juan Gabriel Vasquez in Colombia.

Here in the UK we have one of the most

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