Jim McCrory asked Scott Russell Sanders:

Hi Scott, Greetings from Scotland. May I ask, who are your favourite writers?

Scott Russell Sanders And hello to you, Jay Mac, from the hill country of southern Indiana. I suspect you are a lifelong reader, as I am, and so you will understand when I say that I have many favorite writers, and the ones I turn to most frequently have changed over time. My earliest enthusiasm was for Mark Twain, whose work I still love. As a teenager, I read a lot of southern writers, such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Penn Warren. In college I became fascinated by the American Transcendentalists, especially Thoreau and Emerson, along with their contemporaries, Melville and Whitman, to all of whom I have returned to ever since. Because of my interest in ethics and social issues, I read works by James Baldwin and Thomas Merton, and I began developing an interest in Buddhism, which led me to Gary Snyder and Peter Matthiessen, and all of those writers still matter a great deal to me. During my four years in graduate school at Cambridge, I made up slightly for my ignorance of British literature by steeping myself in works by Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell. Back in the States, where I becamve a university teacher, I began adding what some people call "nature writers" and I call "Earth writers" to my shortlist of favorites: Wendell Berry, Annie, Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Wallace Stegner, Mary Oliver, Loren Eiseley, and Aldo Leopold. Because I'm an American writer, I am drawn primarily to writers from my own country; but I also admire the work of Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Thich Nhat Hanh, and--closer to your home ground--Robert Macfarlane, who has written memorably about Scotland, among many other places.

Thanks for your question. Best wishes--
Scott Russell Sanders

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