Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Hilary Mantel top poll of best UK and Irish authors

Critics, academics and authors vote to find ‘the new Elizabetheans’, to correct the tendency to champion older authors as the literary establishment

Ali Smith has topped a poll by the Times Literary Supplement of about 200 critics, academics and authors that set out to find the best British and Irish novelists writing today.

Four of the top five places in the TLS’s ranking of what it dubbed the “New Elizabethans” went to women, with Smith followed by Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Eimear McBride. The project set out, said the TLS’s editor Stig Abell, to avoid the “tendency to fall back on a group of authors who came to prominence a few decades ago”, with writers such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis all failing to make the list. The literary journal said the poll was carried out “in a spirit of mischief”.

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