Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Not Read Yet, But Who I Want To Read

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Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

This week’s theme is courtesy of Deanna @ A Novel Glimpse and is a great opportunity to remind myself of some of the great books and authors out there that I have not had a chance to read yet, and perhaps to edge some of them further up my TBR pile.

And for once, let’s focus on the author rather than the books, with their Wikipedia biographies, where available.

Ocean Vuong

Vuong was born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam…A two-year-old Vuong and his family eventually arrived in a refugee camp in the Philippines before achieving asylum and migrating to the United States, settling in Hartford, Connecticut, United States with six relatives. His father abandoned his family after that. Vuong was reunited with his paternal grandfather later in life. Vuong, who suspects dyslexia runs in his family, was the first in his family to learn to read, at the age of eleven.

Nghi Vo

Vo was born in Peoria, Illinois, where she lived until attending college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Vo now lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan. She defines her sexuality as queer.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Sáenz was raised near Las Cruces, New Mexico.[1] He earned a BA in Humanities and Philosophy from St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He continues to live and work in El Paso, Texas. After 15 years of marriage to his wife, an El Paso family court judge, he came out as gay, and they filed for divorce in 2009.

Rivers Solomon

Solomon is non-binary and intersex and states that they use fae/faer and they/them pronouns. They describe themselves as “a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.”

As of 2018, Solomon lives in Cambridge, UK, with their family.

Tade Thompson

Thompson was born in London to Yoruba parents. His family left the United Kingdom for Nigeria around 1976, when Thompson was about seven. He grew up in Nigeria, where he studied medicine and social anthropology. He went on to specialise in psychiatry. He returned to the UK in 1998, where he has remained except for a year spent working in Samoa. He now lives on the south coast of England.

Walter Mosley

Mosley was born in California. He was an only child and ascribes his writing imagination to “an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies”. For $9.50 a week, Walter Mosley attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history.

Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than forty books and often publishing two books a year. He has written in a variety of fiction categories, including mystery and afrofuturist science fiction, as well as nonfiction politics.

Namina Forna

Namina Forna was born and grew up in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. After her parents divorced, Forna’s mother moved to Atlanta. However, due to the looming civil war and general political instability in Sierra Leone, her father decided to also send his 9-year-old daughter to live with her mother.

Forna loved reading as a child. In an interview with Elle, she explained that reading was her way of escaping the atrocities of the civil war.

Eloghosa Osunde

Eloghosa Osunde is a Nigerian writer and artist. An alumna of the Farafina Creative Writing Workshop, the Caine Prize Workshop, and the New York Film Academy, she has been published in The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Catapult, and other venues. Winner of the 2021 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of a Miles Morland Scholarship, she is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2020 MacDowell Colony Fellow.

T. L. Huchu

Tendai Huchu (born September 28, 1983) who also writes as T. L. Huchu is a Zimbabwean author, best known for his novels The Hairdresser of Harare (2010) and The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician (2014). He is now a podiatrist in Edinburgh.

Tomi Adeyemi

Tomi Adeyemi was born on August 1, 1993 in the United States to parents who emigrated from Nigeria. Adeyemi wrote her first story when she was five years old, and continued to write throughout her teenage years. Adeyemi went on to graduate from Harvard University with an honors degree in English Literature, then studied West African mythology and culture in Salvador, Brazil, on a fellowship. It was this experience that inspired her to write Children of Blood and Bone, the breakthrough novel that would launch her career.

Elodie Harper

Elodie Harper is a journalist and prize-winning short story writer. Her story ‘Wild Swimming’ won the 2016 Bazaar of Bad Dreams short story competition, which was judged by Stephen King.

She is currently a reporter at ITV News Anglia, and before that worked as a producer for Channel 4 News. Her job as a journalist has seen her join one of the most secretive wings of the Church of Scientology and cover the far right hip hop scene in Berlin, as well as crime reporting in Norfolk where her first two novels were set – The Binding Song and The Death Knock.

Before I sign off, I will quickly give a shout out to the author who I am currently reading, who was also new to me when I started:

Violet Kupersmith

Violet Kupersmith was born in central Pennsylvania in 1989 and later moved with her family to the Philadelphia suburbs. Her father is a white American and her mother is from Da Nang, Vietnam.

Her mother’s family fled the country by boat following the fall of Saigon in 1975, and were resettled in Port Arthur, Texas.

As always, please do let me know your thoughts and whether you have read any of these authors – which should I really push up my TBR pile? Add comments below and I’ll try to reply

Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes


April 19: Bookish Merchandise I’d Love to Own
April 26: Books with [___] On the Cover (Pick a thing (a color, an item, a place, an animal, a scripty font, a sexy person, etc.) and share covers that have that thing on the cover.)
May 3: One-Word Reviews for the Last Ten Books I Read (submitted by Susan @ Bloggin’ ’bout Books)
May 10: Bookish Characters (these could be readers, writers, authors, librarians, professors, etc.)
May 17: Books I Was SO EXCITED to Get, but Still Haven’t Read (bonus points if you tell us how long it’s been since you got them!)
May 24: Book Quote Freebie (Share your favorite book quotes that fit a theme of your choosing! These could be quotes about books/reading, or quotes from books. Some examples are: quotes for book lovers, quotes that prove reading is the best thing ever, funny things characters have said, romantic declarations, pretty scenery descriptions, witty snippets of dialogue, etc.)
May 31: Comfort Reads (Share which books or kinds of books you turn to when you need to escape. You can either share specific titles if you love to re-read, or you could share qualities of books you look for in a comfort read.)

Published by The Book Lover's Sanctuary

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31 thoughts on “Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Not Read Yet, But Who I Want To Read”

  6. The thing I love most about your list of authors is that all but one are POC. It makes my heart happy to see so many POC authors when even just 10 years ago it wasn’t as prominent.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. It’s so refreshing to see a list with authors from such a rich variety of cultural backgrounds. The writing that is coming from Nigeria and some of the other African nations is wonderful.

    This is the first time I’ve visited your blog and am bowled over by the creative use of images. It must take you a long time to get them so well aligned.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Oooh excellent list! I’ve had Ocean Vuong on my radar for a while now. I really enjoyed both Aristotle and Dante and also The Gilded Ones. I own Children of Blood and Bone but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. A wonderful list of authors! The Gilded Ones was a great read, and I am looking forward to reading The Merciless Ones.

    Pam @ Read! Bake! Create!

    Liked by 1 person

  14. Great post! It’s nice to focus on the authors this week, isn’t it? I’ve only read Aristotle and Dante, but I enjoyed it! I hope you get to some of these soon. 🙂

    Like

  16. I finally read Namina Forna and Rivers Solomon this year and I really enjoyed their books so I’m keen to read more by them soon. I totally forgot about Kupersmith but I added her book to my TBR after seeing it on one of your other TTTs—it looks/sounds so good and I can’t wait to read it. I hope you click with all these authors/books!

    Liked by 1 person

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