21st-century short story writers

Brigitte Fontaine, (born June 24, 1939) is a singer of avant-garde music. She has employed numerous unusual musical styles, melding rock and roll, folk, jazz, electronica, spoken word poetry, and world. She has collaborated with Stereolab, Michel Colombier, Jean-Claude Vannier, Areski Belkacem, Gotan Project, Sonic Youth, Antoine Duhamel, Grace Jones, Noir Désir, Archie Shepp, Arno, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. She is also a novelist, playwright, poet, and actress.

Neil Patrick Jordan (born 25 February 1950) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He won an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) for The Crying Game (1992). He has also won three Irish Film and Television Awards, as well as the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival for The Butcher Boy (1997).

Peter Solis Nery is a Filipino poet, fictionist, author, and filmmaker. Writing in Hiligaynon, he is a Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature Hall of Fame Awardee, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Literary Grant, and the All-Western Visayas Literary Contest (National Commission for Culture and the Arts) winner. In 2015, he became the first Filipino author to be invited to the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates. Writing in English, Filipino, and Hiligaynon, he has authored at least 20 books, and has written screenplays. He wrote and edited newspapers in Iloilo City before becoming a nurse in the United States.

Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1958) is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. His work is characterised by a raw Scots dialect and brutal depiction of Edinburgh life. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.

Gabriel García Márquez ( 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958 he married Mercedes Barcha; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Eleanor Catton MNZM (born 24 September 1985) is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

Milan Kundera (, 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech-born French writer. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 and he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019. He saw himself as a French writer and insisted his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores.

Karin Kallmaker (born 1960) is an American author of lesbian fiction whose works also include those originally written under the name Laura Adams. Her writings span lesbian romance, lesbian erotica, and lesbian science-fiction/fantasy. Dubbed the Queen of Lesbian Romance, she publishes exclusively in the lesbian market as a matter of personal choice.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ( ; born 15 September 1977) is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [which] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature", particularly in her second home, the United States.

Ben Okri OBE FRSL (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions, and has been compared favourably to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez.