Raymond Carver (1976) Possibly the most economical short story writer in this list, Carver, with his precise, punchy prose, conveys in a few words what many novelists take several pages to elucidate.
For artists, novelists and film-makers, however, butterflies and moths have often taken on darker meanings.
In 2010, Foulds was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has recently been awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and named as one of Granta's 'Best of Young British Novelists'.
There is nothing new, of course, about the Man Booker list featuring novelists from the former colonies.
I used to think that imaginative failure explained the relative lack of public concern about state and corporate surveillance: people simply cannot conceive where this stuff might be taking us, which is why we needed novelists such as Orwell and Aldous Huxley – and now Dave Eggers – to help us visualise potential dystopias.
In a previous era, the most prophetic evocations of where we were headed were produced by two Old Etonian novelists – George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
I'd forgotten quite how swathey it was, rather unkindly imagining literary novelists and Big Thinkers in stripped-pine north London would be over-represented.
Those poets put me in touch with novelists and eventually playwrights.
Perhaps because of its proximity to Canberra, the Sydney Writers' Festival has always done politics well, attracting well known politicians and political journalists, and I saw two events that day on writing and politics that intersected in interesting ways: Carr on his Diary, and How Do Novelists Engage with Politics?
As early as 1944, Sinclair Lewis himself hailed Stegner as, "one of the most important novelists in America" but the national book award winning novel was not published until 1976.
Novelists from Africa have also had their imaginations ignited by Detroit.
