Coates, Ferrante, Robinson on ‘Time’ magazine’s 100 most influential list

Authors Elena Ferrante, Marilynne Robinson and Ta-Nehisi Coates are on Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, reports Shelf Awareness. In Time, Lauren Groff writes of Ferrante: ‘The story we hear most often about the Italian author Elena Ferrante is the story of her absence … it’s odd, though, to imagine that a photo or biography could tell us more about Ferrante than her astonishing books, translated fluidly into English by the great Ann Goldstein, which together form a topographical map of an extraordinary mind’. Colm Tóibín writes that Robinson’s novels and essays ‘exude a sense of sensuous feeling but also rigorous thinking’. ‘She is concerned with how we should live, with the idea of the world as a sort of gift to us, which requires us to notice what we have been offered, and to study it, to appreciate it and to dramatize its textures and contours.’ Bryan Stevenson describes Coates’ ‘timely, provocative and well-researched writings about race and this nation’s shameful history of inequality’ as ‘essential reading’, and his latest book Between the World and Me as ‘brilliantly structured, insightful and forcefully argued’. To see the full list, click here.

Category: International news