Female Authors We Think You Should Know About (If You Didn't Already)

We're shining the light on some great female authors

1. Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby (Granta)

Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby is a book of essays examining the author's relationship with her mother, diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Yet it spreads so much wider than this. With essays on leprosy, Frankenstein and Inuit culture, it is a study on how we tell our stories and how we connect with others.

2. Rachel Cusk - Outline (Faber)

Canadian author Rachel Cusk is no stranger to praise. Two of her books have been shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award (now the Costa Book Awards). Her debut novel Saving Agnes won in 1993. Her latest book Outline was shortlisted for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize.

3. Hannah Kent - Burial Rites (Picador)

In 19th century Iceland, the state has condemned Agnes Magnusdottir to death for the murder of her former lover. A debut novel from Hannah Kent, Burial Rites is bleak yet beautiful. Shortlisted for the 2014 Baileys Prize for Women, judge Sophie Raworth praised it as a "stunning, haunting debut novel."

4. Elizabeth Garner - The Ingenious Edgar Jones (Headline)

Unbound fiction-reader Elizabeth Garner knows a good thing or two about how to write great fiction. After all, as an author herself, her novels are full of imagination and charming characters.

5. Leslie Jamieson - The Empathy Exams (Granta)

The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays that not only explore what it is to have empathy, but what it is to be human. Author Leslie Jamison delves into personal experiences, from her interviews with New Mexican drug cartels to witnessing her brother attempt to run the “Hardest Marathon in the World.”

6. Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (Vintage)

You may have heard of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film Persepolis, but you may not have known that it started as a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapis. Amongst a plethora of male graphic novelists, Satrapis stands out, for all the right reasons, with Persepolis being voted ‘Best Comic of 2003’ by Time magazine.

7. Zelda Fitzgerald - Save Me The Waltz (Vintage)

Save Me the Waltz is Zelda Fitzgerald’s only novel. The pin up girl of the jazz age has recently been receiving more recognition as an author and individual in her own right. This is largely thanks to the novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Joy Fowler. Read it to see why Zelda deserves so much more than the title of “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife”.

8. Susan Elderkin - Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains (4th Estate)

Don't be fooled by the cute title – as this debut novel from Susan Elderkin evolves, you'll start to realise it takes no prisoners. Who knew a stuffy mobile home in the Arizona desert and a Slovakian shoe factory were the ideal backdrops for literary fiction to show us (as ever) the grisly truth of human nature? Strange, tender, alien and acetic: it'll get under your skin.

9. Ann Quin - Berg (Marion Boyars)

In 1972 the novelist Ann Quin swam out to sea between the two piers at Brighton and was never seen again. She was a working class novelist who wrote in a modernist style. Her first book (she only wrote four) is her best. It starts... "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father."