Some Personal Favourites...

Authors

New Lights: Gary Shteyngart, Akhil Sharma, Olga Grushin, Alexander Hemon, Haruki Murakami

UK: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans), Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage), William Shakespeare, Bronte sisters, Alexander Mccall Smith, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling (Kim), George Bernard Shaw, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Greene, John le Carré, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, V.S. Naipaul (only for Biswas and Guerrillas), William Dalrymple, E. M. Forster

Russian: Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nicholai Gogol, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Mayakovsky

US: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Dreiser, David Remnick, Henry James, Maya Angelou, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Charles Dickinson

Latin America: Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges

Indian: Salman Rushdie (now UK), Ved Mehta (now US), Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayanan, Amartya Sen (now US), Khushwant Singh, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (now US), Anita Desai (In Custody), Mahadevi Varma

The rest: Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Albert Camus, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Henrik Ibsen, Sadat Hasan Manto, Abdelrahman Munif, Liam O’Flaherty, Thomas Mann, Johann Goethe, Gunter Grass, James Joyce (Dubliners), Camilo José Cela, Alice Munro, Franz Kafka

Non Fiction: Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jurgen Habermas, David Remnick, Robert Fisk, Michael Taussig, Ben Orlove, Noam Chomsky, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Michael Schudson, Anthony Lewis

Graphical Novel: Art Spiegelman (Maus)

Artists

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Francisco Goya, John Singer Sargent, Diego Velasquez, Edward Hopper, Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), Gustav Klimt, Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, Georgia O’Keeffe, Amrita Pritam, Andy Warhol, Edgar Degas, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock

Contemporary Artists: Saira Wasim, Brian Jungen, Ashok Sukumaran, Damien Hirst, Banksy, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp

Music:

Gotan Project, Amy Winehouse, Norah Jones, Ali Farka Toure, Cheb Khaled, Nusrat Fateh Ali, Bach, Kishori Amonkar, Mohammed Rafi, Celia Cruz, Lauren Hill, Fela Kuti, Gypsy Kings, Lynda Lymay, Alain Souchon, Wynton Marsalis, K.D. Lang

Movies:

Ikiru, Raise the Red Lantern, Raging Bull, Brazil, Reservoir Dogs, Lawrence of Arabia, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!, Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Gosford Park, 28 Days Later, Bourne Identity, Orfeu Negro, Station Agent, Ten, Before Sunset, Cidade de Deus, Apocalypse Now, In Custody, Shakespeare Wallah, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Little Miss Sunshine, The Battle of Algiers, Pan’s Labyrinth, Motorcycle Diaries, The Secret of the Grain, Chungking Express

Indian: Umrao Jaan(old), Shatranj Ke Khilari, Saraansh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Golmaal(old), Bawarchi, Anand, Silsila, Gaman, Pyaasa, Ankur, Omkara, Maqbool

Naming Names: Directors and Producers Merchant-Ivory Productions, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Kar Wai Wong, Zhang Yimou, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Pedro Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Hrishikesh Mukherjee

Naming Names: Actors Emma Thompson