Some favorite (mostly contemporary) authors:

Margaret Atwood A. S. Byatt Louise Erdrich Barbara Kingsolver Ann Patchett Ali Smith Jeanette Winterson Angela Carter

Some great authors:

George Eliot Virginia Woolf Charlotte Brontë Edith Wharton Jane Austen Toni Morrison Simone de Beauvoir Gertrude Stein Iris Murdoch Flannery O’Connor Alice Walker