For aspiring authors, there is little better inspiration than the work of published, and acclaimed, authors.
Terry Fallis’s 10th novel, The Marionette, released on Oct. 7.
He’s the Ontario-based author of several comedic novels including The High Road and Albatross. He won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his debut novel The Best Laid Plans as well as for No Relation, and has been a finalist five times.Â
The Best Laid Plans won Canada Reads 2011, when it was defended by Ali Velshi.
Fallis, along with Maria Reva and Tracey Lindberg will judge the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize.
Fallis appeared on The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing and talked about the four books he recommends any aspiring author read.
For Fallis, creating the book list “was a trial by fire” and said he started with “a list of about 20 and slowly weeded out the ones I could dispense with” until “I was left with four.”
Though he has read a lot of writing books now, he used to read biographies and books on economics or public policy because he didn’t start writing creatively for a long time. This seeped into his recommendations somewhat.
“I wrote a couple of short stories” early on, he said, though “I never sent them anywhere, it was just recreational. But the itch to write started a long time ago and finally bore fruit when I wrote my first novel when I was 45.”
Pilot Jack Knight by A.M Anderson and R.E Johnson
Pilot Jack Knight is a book by A.M Anderson and R.E Johnson. (Wheeler Publishing)
Pilot Jack Knight by authors A.M. Anderson and R.E. Johnson is a biography of Jack Knight, the first pilot to make an intercontinental mail delivery. This non-fiction book carries power in the emotions conveyed by the words on the page, detailing the death of one of Jack Knight’s closest friends in a plane crash.
“Why it’s on the list, it was the first book that made me cry,” Fallis said. It was “the first book that taught me that words on a blank page could actually make you cry.”
[This book] taught me that words on a blank page could actually make you cry.- Terry Fallis
Part of the book talks about the death of Jack Knight’s close friend in a plane crash, leading Fallis to say: “In a way it was a book about friendship as much as it was about flying and following your dreams. And as happens so often in those early years of aviation, he crashed. His friend crashed and died.”
“I remember I saw a tear fall onto the page and it was just the words on the page that made that happen and that struck a writerly chord in me that it’s possible to do that,” Fallis said about reading the book as a child.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast is a book by Ernest Hemingway. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, Central Press/Getty Images)
Another non-fiction book, A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir about his life in Paris in the postwar years.
“It triggered in me a fascination with Paris of the 1920s and all of the shifts in culture that happened at that time in that special city in the wake of the great war,” Fallis said.
What made this book so influential for Fallis is its description of the life of young expats living and writing in Paris, reshaping the cultural and literary landscape of the world, “turning prose on its head.”
It gives me some comfort that maybe I didn’t start writing too late.- Terry Fallis
Fallis said that he and his wife travel to Paris every few years “and stay on the Left Bank where the writers lived at the time.”
The tradition emerged because it was his wife who introduced him to the book. Early in their relationship, she had a first-edition copy which she leant to him to read. He said what he learnt from that book is that “you have to live a little before you can write, and he lived large.”
“It gives me some comfort that maybe I didn’t start writing too late, that I needed to live a little before I started writing.”
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he wrote seven novels, six short story collections, and two books of non-fiction.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving 
A Prayer for Owen Meany is a book by John Irving. (Jane Sobel Klonsky/HarperCollins)
A Prayer for Owen Meany is a novel that tells the story of John Wheelwright and his childhood best friend Owen Meany.
Because of his professional life, Fallis said he spent years reading books on history, economics, and public policy but “I woke up one morning and said, ‘I have this gaping void in my cultural understanding because I haven’t read fiction in about ten years.'”
I wasn’t fully cognizant of the fact that words on the page could make me laugh until I read John Irving.- Terry Fallis
After reading the finalists for the year’s Booker Prize, which were overwhelmingly bleak, he started picking up fiction books that just seemed interesting. During this time, he came across the works of John Irving.
“I wasn’t fully cognizant of the fact that words on the page could make me laugh until I read John Irving and they did but, more importantly as it affected my writing, he then would juxtapose it with a moment of high pathos and sadness,” Fallis said.
“He would rub humor and pathos right up against one another so that the power of both of those emotions was enhanced by their proximity.”
John Irving is an American-Canadian bestselling novelist of 16 books, five of which have been adapted into film.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow is a novel by Amor Towles. (Dmitri Kasterine, Penguin Books)
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles tells the story of a Russian Count who is sentenced to house arrest in the hotel he lives in by the Bolshevik government.
Though house arrest in a luxury hotel may not seem so bad, he is confined to “a barren room up in the rafters,” Fallis said.
This may be my favourite novel of the last 10 years.- Terry Fallis
The book takes place in the “immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution,” where the authorities consider “the intellectual dandy,” Count Alexander Rostov, “a social parasite,” he said.
“This may be my favourite novel of the last 10 years.”
Amor Towles is a historical fiction writer currently based in New York City. He is also the author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
If you’re interested in writing fiction, the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize is accepting submissions until Nov. 1. You can submit your original, unpublished short fiction for a chance to win $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have your story published on CBC Books.