QCA List of Authors every teenager should read.

QCA recently published a list of authors they believe EVERY teenager should - whether it is reading an entire novel or through an anthology examples of their writing. Reading is fast becoming a lost 'art', so often children and teenagers spend more time in front of their computer, DVD or PS3 than they do reading. Yet reading is the essence of the English language and as such must be encouraged. Here is the new list of authors - note the influence of world literature reflecting the need for understanding of different cultures.

How many of these authors have you read or know?

From Meera Syal to Charles Dickens: Ken Boston's list for 14- to 16-year-olds

Contemporary writers

Douglas Adams, Richard Adams, Fleur Adcock, Isabel Allende, Simon Armitage, Alan Ayckbourn, JG Ballard, Pat Barker, Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale, Bill Bryson, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, Brian Clark, Gillian Clarke, Robert Cormier, Jennifer Donnelly, Keith Douglas, Roddy Doyle, Carol Ann Duffy, UA Fanthorpe, John Fowles, Brian Friel, Mark Haddon, Willis Hall, David Hare, Tony Harrison, Susan Hill, SE Hinton, Jackie Kay, Harper Lee, Laurie Lee, Andrea Levy, Joan Lingard, Penelope Lively, Liz Lochhead, Mal Peet, Philip Pullman, Peter Porter, Willy Russell, Jo Shapcott, RC Sherriff, Zadie Smith, Arnold Wesker

English literary heritage

Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, John Bunyan, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Congreve, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Donne, John Dryden, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, John Keats, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, RB Sheridan, Edmund Spenser, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, Henry Vaughan, HG Wells, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Wyatt

Twentieth century heritage list

Kingsley Amis, WH Auden, TS Eliot, EM Forster, Robert Frost, William Golding, Graham Greene, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Jennings, James Joyce, Philip Larkin, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sean O'Casey, George Orwell, Wilfred Owen, Harold Pinter, Slyvia Plath, JB Priestley, Siegfried Sassoon, Peter Shaffer, George Bernard Shawe, Stevie Smith, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas, RS Thomas, William Trevor, Evelyn Waugh, John Wyndham, WB Yeats

Writers from different cultures and traditions

Chinua Achebe, John Agard, Monica Ali, Maya Angelou, Moniza Alvi, Isaac Bashevis-Singer, James Berry, Edward Brathwaite, Anita Desai, Emily Dickinson, F Scott Fitzgerald, Athol Fugard, Jamila Gavin, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Doris Lessing, Les Murray, Beverly Naidoo, RK Narayan, Grace Nichols, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Wole Soyinka, John Steinbeck, Meera Syal, Bali Rai, Mildred D Taylor, Mark Twain, Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, Adeline Yen Mah, Benjamin Zephaniah