The Odyssey takes number one spot in BBC Culture’s Top 100 Stories that Shaped the World list

-          Key Indian authors also are a prominent part of this list   -
23rd  May, 2018, Mumbai: Today, BBC Culture releases its list, The 100 Stories that Shaped the World, highlighting the works of literature that have had the biggest impact on forging the world we live in today. This list reflects the thoughts of more than 100 authors, academics, journalists, and critics located in 35 countries around the world who nominated the stories they considered the most influential.
The top 10 stories are:
2.       Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3.       Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4.       Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5.       Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6.       One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th centuries)
7.       Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8.       Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9.       One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
10.   The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC)
Key Indian stories with Indian authors are:-
1.       One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th centuries - Nilanjana S. Roy, novelist and Financial Times columnist, India)
2.       Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
3.       The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
4.       The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
5.       Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) - Nilanjana S. Roy, novelist and Financial Times columnist, India)
-          Quote on One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th centuries)
Nilanjana S. Roy, novelist and Financial Times columnist, India:
“Because it's the deepest of wells. In medieval and modern times, from writers to singers and film-makers, we never stopped drawing from it.”

BBC Culture Editor, Rebecca Laurence, said: “At BBC Culture, we wanted to start a conversation about the importance of literature in the world; to discover the stories that had the greatest impact globally and that had endured through history. Above all, we aimed to celebrate the importance and power of storytelling.”
Explaining why she voted for Homer’s Odyssey, the top story, Natalie Haynes, a writer and broadcaster in the UK said: “Because it is one of the great foundational myths of Western culture, because it asks what it means to be a hero, because it has great female characters in it, as well as men, because it is full of gods and monsters and is properly epic and because it forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and the ever-current issue of what it means to return home.”

Bethanne Patrick, a contributing editor at Lit Hub, added: “I believe the journey of Odysseus defined a streak of individualism particular to Western culture that has led to much change in the world-good and bad.”
Voters’ thoughts on other nominated works include:

Sophia Smith Galer, BBC journalist, UK, on One Thousand and One Nights: “In the 18th Century, Antoine Galland’s translation of the tales said to have been compiled in the Middle East and Persia conjured a definitive, Orientalist view of the Arab world that has lasted to today. The symbols and characters in the stories – from Aladdin’s cave to devilish adventurers, djinn and harems – still show in 2018 how cultural appropriation, appreciation and racism continue to manifest within the parameters of Arabian Nights imagery.”

Elizabeth Rosner, novelist, poet and critic, USA, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “This novel effectively helped an entire nation not only to question its deplorable laws and practices but also to change forever a system of violently racist dehumanisation. That, for me, defines literature at its best.”

Beverley Naidoo, novelist, UK, on Things Fall Apart: “Published within my life time, it has been possible to see the effect of a single work of fiction in offering a radically different 'view of Africa'. The European colonial narrative could never be the same after this first work by Achebe was published in the Heinemann African Writers' series.”

Just missing the top ten was Toni Morrison’s Beloved, coming in at number 11. Susan Larson, journalist and critic at WWNO and The New Orleans Advocate, USA, said of that work: “This exquisitely written novel forever changed the way we see the African-American experience. Morrison broke boundaries of time and language and consciousness in this work, an unforgettable chronicle of loss and grief.”

Methodology and results
The BBC polled writers around the world to nominate up to five influential stories, via an online poll in May 2018. There were 108 respondents, located in 35 different countries: 43 people (40%) were from Europe, 32 (30%) were from North America (US or Mexico), and 33 (31%) were from Africa, Asia, South America or Australia and New Zealand. The voters were 59% female and 40% male.
Respondents voted for 260 different stories in total. Almost half the stories chosen were originally written in the English language; 24 (9%) in French; and 5% each in Russian, German and Spanish. 33 different languages were represented in total, including Sumerian, K’iche and Ge’ez.
Dickens and Shakespeare were the most popular authors, with four stories each. 189 (72%) of the stories were written by men, 56 (21%) by women and 15 (6%) by unknown authors or with many authors – this includes ancient stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh and archetypal stories, like Cinderella, that have been written in many different versions.

The Odyssey by Homer had a considerable lead over the other stories; 23 critics (about one in five) voted for it.

BBC Culture Stories that Shaped the World poll; full list
List sorted descending by number of critic votes, then descending by total critic points, then alphabetically.
1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th century BC)
2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th centuries)
7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615)
8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967)
10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th century BC)
11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)
12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320)
13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597)
14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th centuries BC)
15. Harry Potter Series (J.K. Rowling, 1997-2007)
16. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)
17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922)
18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)
19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847)
20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856)
21. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong, 1321-1323)
22. Journey to the West (Wu Cheng'en, circa 1592)
23. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevksy, 1866)
24. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen, 1813)
25. Water Margin (attributed to Shi Nai'an, 1589)
26. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1867)
27. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960)
28. Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
29. Aesop's Fables (Aesop, circa 620 to 560 BC)
30. Candide (Voltaire, 1759)
31. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC)
32. The Mahabharata (attributed to Vyasa, 4th century BC)
33. King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1608)
34. The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, before 1021)
35. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774)
36. The Trial (Franz Kafka, 1925)
37. Remembrance of Things Past (Marcel Proust, 1913-1927)
38. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)
39. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)
40. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
41. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)
42. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf, 1927)
43. The True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun, 1921-1922)
44. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll, 1865)
45. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1873-1877)
46. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899)
47. Monkey Grip (Helen Garner, 1977)
48. Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)
49. Oedipus the King (Sophocles, 429 BC)
50. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka, 1915)
51. The Oresteia (Aeschylus, 5th century BC)
52. Cinderella (unknown author and date)
53. Howl (Allen Ginsberg, 1956)
54. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)
55. Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871-1872)
56. Pedro Páramo (Juan Rulfo, 1955)
57. The Butterfly Lovers (folk story, various versions)
58. The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387)
59. The Panchatantra (attributed to Vishnu Sharma, circa 300 BC)
60. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1881)
61. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark, 1961)
62. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (Robert Tressell, 1914)
63. Song of Lawino (Okot p'Bitek, 1966)
64. The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)
65. Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)
66. Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988)
67. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943)
68. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1967)
69. The Ramayana (attributed to Valmiki, 11th century BC)
70. Antigone (Sophocles, circa 441 BC)
71. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897)
72. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969)
73. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843)
74. América (Raúl Otero Reiche, 1980)
75. Before the Law (Franz Kafka, 1915)
76. Children of Gebelawi (Naguib Mahfouz, 1967)
77. Il Canzoniere (Petrarch, 1374)
78. Kebra Nagast (various authors, 1322)
79. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868-1869)
80. Metamorphoses (Ovid, 8 AD)
81. Omeros (Derek Walcott, 1990)
82. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1962)
83. Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)
84. Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal Australian story cycle, date unknown)
85. Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates, 1961)
86. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe, 1719)
87. Song of Myself (Walt Whitman, 1855)
88. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884)
89. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)
90. The Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges, 1945)
91. The Eloquent Peasant (ancient Egyptian folk story, circa 2000 BC)
92. The Emperor's New Clothes (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837)
93. The Jungle (Upton Sinclair, 1906)
94. The Khamriyyat (Abu Nuwas, late 8th-early 9th century)
95. The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth, 1932)
96. The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe, 1845)
97. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988)
98. The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992)
99. The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats, 1962)
100. Toba Tek Singh (Saadat Hasan Manto, 1955)

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