Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is one of those writers who invoke a child-like sense of adventure no matter how old your body and mind says you are. Not surprising coming from a writer who cites the likes of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mary Shelley and Rudyard Kipling as his influences. But what Gaiman does stunningly well is to bring fantasy into the everyday like the London Below from Neverwhere, the America of American Gods and the little village from The Ocean at the End of the Lane. This is, for me, what brings a sense of realism into Gaiman’s stories. It’s probably why every time I read those books, I think wouldn’t it be cool if/and it is also probably why American Gods, which was written in 2001 and just recently adapted into a TV series on Netflix, is considered politically relevant in 2017. Unlike most who fell in love with Gaiman’s work, I didn’t start with The Sandman comics (and still haven’t read them to date, it’s a travesty, I know) but rather I picked up a copy of Neverwhere; from there, I just continued reading. Although his writing style is deceptively simple, his immense storytelling capability is what shines through on each page. There is a video somewhere out there where Gaiman tells a story for this project called The Moth; in it, he recollects the time when his parents forgot to pick him up from a train station. Again, simple language but, by the end of the story, he had the crowd in the palm of his hands. – Daniel Goh
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