It’s that time of year again! It’s time to celebrate women, and in this post specifically, celebrate female authors worldwide. We’ve done our best to be inclusive, so we’ve included different nationalities and members of the LGBTQ+ communities. It’s important to us to acknowledge women from all over the world who have given us some of our favorite books through the years.
Now let’s see which female authors have been more prominent lately, and let’s celebrate them. At the end, I’ll include some honorary mentions. Happy international women’s day!
Zadie Smith
Chances are, you haven’t heard of spoken word poetry. Or maybe you did when you learned about Zadie Smith. She not only revived the lost art of spoken poetry, but created her own unique style of it and became very popular for it on Instagram. Her writing writing focuses on themes of race, culture, and family in contemporary society. You can see her poems on Instagram or in her books:
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is a vision. She’s a very popular, very influential author of the two best-selling, award-winning books In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties. Her feminist reflections on same-sex relationships and the woman’s body are great food for thought. And her books are not only five-star reads but also very uniquely written, in vignette form. It’s safe to say that Machado is very influential on those topics and is the well-deserved recipient of awards such as Bard Fiction Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, among many more. More of her books:
Madeline Miller
Madeline Miller started a whole new book trend – Greek retellings and historical retellings overall. With her amazing books Circe and The Song of Achilles, she not only became popular on tiktok where more and more young readers are discovering their love for mythology and classic literature, but she also incited an entire hoard of new authors to write their debuts in this niche genre. You know the books you see everywhere with the filigree and historical symbolism on the covers? Yep, she inspired us all to look to the past and retell those stories anew. Examples of this are:
Colleen Hoover
If you hop into any bookish community online, you’ll probably find a lot of Colleen Hoover books. She’s sold millions of copies, which is not something most authors can boast to. She’s taken the #booktok and #booktube communities by storm (one being on Tik Tok and the other on Youtube) and is dominating the younger female readership demographic. While she’s definitely a polarizing name – some people love while others really hate her books – especially in literary critic circles, nothing changes the fact that she is one of the most successful authors at present time. Her most popular titles include:
Sarah J Maas
How many authors can claim that a whole new genre has been created after their books? Not that Sarah J Maas singularly contributed to the creation of the new genre called Romantasy, but many fantasy romance readers will point to her books first if you mention it. Right now, there is a frenzy of new readers hopping on the ACOTAR train (the name of her most popular series: A Court of Thorns and Roses), which has six very hefty books. In fact, people are reading and re-reading them obsessively because of the tumultuous romance plot that’s the main feature of the book. Maas’ most popular books:
N K Jamisin
The Fifth Season trilogy has been said to be one of the most genius contemporary works and has won multiple book awards, including the Hugo award. The books themselves are written in the second person, which is difficult to do well, but the author managed it beautifully. We should celebrate her just for this accomplishment alone. Not to mention her other amazing works:
R.F. Kuang
Recently, in 2023 to be precise, the bookish world was set on fire by a single historical fantasy book – Babel by R.F. Kuang. Readers from all over the world were competing to read the hefty 600+ page book and share their views with the world. Normally, a book would have a balance between its critics and its lovers, but Babel was strikingly loved by almost everyone who read it. As one of those people, I can certainly vouch for the magic that the book weaves on you as you read it. Just for this work, along with her other amazing books, R.F. Kuang deserves to be in this list. More of her titles:
Juno Dawson
Juno Dawson’s This Book Is Gay has been both recommended to be stocked in American school libraries and in the same breath banned from said places. Her other book What’s the T? is about being transgender, which the author is intimately familiar with. Juno Dawson inspires young people to look within and discover who they are and be true to themselves in this world of trying to fit in. I truly believe authors such as her should be elevated in society, so more people can hear their voices. More of her books:
Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante is a prominent literary fiction author, whose skill has been acknowledged by literary critics everywhere (which is admittedly very difficult to do). While the covers of her books are generic – which has caused an outburst of criticism online – the bones of her stories and the writing skill beyond those covers is breath-taking. Her publishers, Europa Editions, even say that the images on the book covers are intentionally chosen to be plain and a bit vulgar, to contrast the deep emotion inside. The anonymity of the author adds to the mystery as well. Nobody knows what she looks like, and so her fanbase grows. In the end, Ferrante has sold million copies online and continues to wow the critics with titles like:
V E Schwab
Not everyone is a fantasy reader, but V. E. Schwab has the unique ability to write low fantasy that appeals to a large readership. As a result, a lot of people are discovering their love for fantasy by starting with the author’s prolific works. She’s the author of Vicious, A Darker Shade of Magic (series) and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which have all received acclaimed and die-hard fan bases worldwide. I personally find her writing style immersive and uniquely hers, which in my eyes, makes her a pretty influential lady.
And those are our picks for influential female authors in 2024?
Enjoy reading their masterpieces!
