Hoare has long been acclaimed as a brilliantly unconventional writer; WG Sebald was among his most devoted fans.
It was an unconventional writer's space, with the train rumbling into a new station every few minutes and absorbing a fresh group of passengers, then lurching onward.
Smith has always been a refreshingly unconventional writer, and How to Be Both is a typically playful novel in two parts, both titled "One", and published in two print runs so that half its readers will begin the book in the company of a disembodied Italian Renaissance artist looking back on her life, and half with a contemporary teenager in mourning for her mother.
He's also a colleague and friend, and one of the brilliant, if highly unconventional, American writers of his generation.
Her earlier influences were modernist icons (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner) and unconventional African-American writers (James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange).
"Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison," he says.
Why not convene a regular council of unconventional elders -- academics, writers, artists, technology wizards, farmers, small business owners and public officials known for their imaginative thinking and their lack of conflicted interests?
Just like thousands of unconventional or ethnic minority writers, I wanted to write a novel that was true to my heart -- a gritty, dark and funny book that told a hard-hitting story.
It was unconventional enough for the writer Radclyffe Hall and the monocle-wearing Lady Una Troubridge to live together in Paris openly as lesbians, but Troubridge also accommodated Hall's obsessive pursuit of a nubile Russian nurse.
Francis Spufford is a writer of brilliantly unconventional nonfiction.
