World class African fiction

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz and A Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih are among the world's 100 best works of fiction, according to the world's top writers.

The prestigious list was first announced on Wednesday, 8 May 2002. Norwegian book clubs asked writers from more than 50 countries to name the world's 10 best pieces of literature. From that they compiled the list of 100 greatest fiction works.

One hundred international writers, including Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer, chose Don Quixote as the world's best work of fiction. The rest of the list, which was not ranked, included works from 13 Nobel literature laureates and nine contemporary writers. Ten writers had more than one book in the list.

08/05/2002

Related stories

• See full list of greatest works
• See article by Margaret Ling on the Africa's 100 Best Book Project