Introducing the Hammock Literary Map
We’re so excited to share the Hammock Literary Map. One of our core pillars is providing thoughtful literary recommendations and curated lists to help readers discover new books. This interactive map is our latest endeavor to make discovering a new author more engaging and intuitive.
It felt almost unbelievable to us that outside of particular genres or promotional activities, there was no world map where you could discover authors. Perhaps we’re just not that good at Googling? So we decided to build this tool, with which you can journey across the globe and uncover nearly 800 literary fiction authors from the 20th and 21st centuries.
You can check out this interactive, searchable tool and explore our database of nearly 800 of the most influential authors from the past 120 or so years. Read on below to learn about our methodology.
Methodology
By nature, any list or database of this kind is always subjective. We felt that in line with our ethos of curating the finest literary and global fiction, it was best to retain an element of curation when deciding the criteria for this list.
We first decided to limit it to 20th and 21st century authors, not only because classic authors prior to that are tougher to gather data on, but also because the ‘canon’ classics are already well-known. We started off by also taking the decision to limit our selection to literary fiction rather than open it up to all forms of writing, in line with the selections we often make on our site.
We then decided to use a few different literary awards, global recognition and other fiction lists to build the database. International authors whose work has been translated into English or who have won global literary prizes were collected from each continent, and we used an extensive series of prizes and our in-house panel to determine listed authors, with occasional exceptions.
We started with the major literary awards - the Nobel Prize, the Booker and International Booker, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the most prestigious awards from various other countries including the Pulitzer, Prix Goncourt, Buchner Prize and several others. We also consulted lists of the Camoes Prize and the Cervantes Prize as well as the Neustadt International Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which was, for a time, one of the highest-value global literary prizes. In addition, we also had a panel subjectively selecting modern classics or works of note, particularly from countries that were underrepresented on these measures.
To map them, we decided to use place of birth as the criteria as to where they could be placed. In the past century, particularly the past thirty or forty years, authors have been far more globally mobile and so we also included the place of residence or death in each author’s bio card. We selected two of the best books from each author, a short bio and various other filters that you can use to toggle and find different combinations or suggestions.
Data Breakdown
As with any such exercise, there will have been omissions and additions that people may or may not agree with. But our purpose in undertaking the project was to help people discover new writers from other parts of the world, to highlight the literary legacy and biases of global awards, and to create a fun tool.
Though our selections of authors are limited to the 20th and 21st centuries, there are many authors published in the early 20th century whose year of birth is prior to 1900, which reflects in the toggle bar amongst the filters. Many writers, particularly in the past century, have been resident in multiple countries or had dual citizenship. In these cases we used place of birth as a primary reference point, except in cases where the writers’ work was completely focused on a different place. In some cases, particularly for the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize, authors who were shortlisted but did not receive the award have been tagged with the honour regardless. Because a large percentage of the list is translated fiction, the ‘language’ filter is a useful tool to see which language an author’s work was originally translated from.
As with any such exercise, there will be many complaints and opinions and issues with the way we’ve selected our data-set, and we encourage dialogue or feedback about it. We are very much aware that many of the major literary prizes are highly Anglo-centric or Euro-centric, and we hope to continue to populate many regions of the map with things we may have overlooked.
Key Features
The sidebar panel card reveals a list of all authors within a region and can be minimised or expanded for each author bio.
The filters on the top panel can be used to only show authors who fit particular criteria.
You can select a continent to move the map to that region of the world and see all authors from that area.
Select a gender to only show Female/ Male/ Non-binary authors.
Select an award to only show authors who have received (or in some cases been nominated for) that prize or honour.
Use the Years toggle bar to find authors alive or active between certain years.
You can search for a particular author or book title to see if it’s been included in our database.
The ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature is a fun way to get random author recommendations. Tag us to tell us which recommendation you got.
We’re working on a series of pieces about the different biases and learnings from twentieth century literary history that we gained insight into from this process. Stay tuned for those by following us on Instagram or subscribing to our newsletter. Click here to go to the map and discover your next read.
Hammock Literary Map Credits
This map was created in collaboration with Public Knowledge Studio.
Team: Charu Pragya, Gyan Lakhwani, Namita Sunil, Ishanou Mohindra, Abhay Puri