Can ESL writers become good english authors?

Any examples in mind?

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Nabokov
Conrad
Kolakowski

rand

Conrad is the only one I can think of.

Kosinski

nabokov wasn't really esl, he was taught english from early childhood by servants imported from england by his filthy rich family. and kolakowski, assuming you mean the historian of marxism, wrote in polish. conrad counts.

Why write in english when they just translate your works? Murakami works.

>The plain fact is that Kolakowski thought like Mill and wrote like Nabokov, and that’s a twinning of genius that we won’t soon encounter again.

>In 1970 he became a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He remained mostly at Oxford, although he spent part of 1974 at Yale University, and from 1981 to 1994 was a part-time professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

His English was pretty good after nearly half a century of using it as his daily language, I think.

>Kolakowski thought like Mill and wrote like Nabokov
makes him sound dull, which i doubt he is...

i'm sure it was but his most famous nonfiction was still written in polish and translated, and afaik he never even attempted fiction in english whereas he wrote some in polish, so i don't really get the nabokov comparison.

Joseph Conrad is the prime example. He puts plenty of English first language authors to shame.

So only one, huh?
Doesn't count.

why do it in the first place? english sounds like shit compared to most languages

The scene is out of balance.
ESL makes the best shows.
But Thorin is the best analysit and co-host.
They don't go together.
Woe is our scene

He also lived most of his life in Britain, or British ships. He probably knew English better than Polish or Russian already by the time he started writing, and most probably had a good editor or reading friends to clean up his prose.
Knowing multiple languages used to be the norm during most of history. Still, I can't remember an ESL writer other than Conrad.

Joesph Conrad was based. Didn’t know a word of English until his 20s I believe. Then mastered the language better than most native speakers

>He also lived most of his life in Britain, or British ships. He probably knew English better than Polish
there's no way he spoke english, a language he learned in his twenties, better than his native polish. it was actually french ships that he served on in his youth and he spoke fluent french with no accent whereas english, his third language, continued to give him some trouble for the rest of his life. his writing was always a mixture of writing directly in english and auto-translation from polish or french, and is sprinkled with polonisms and gallicisms (sometimes indistinguishable from one another since placing an adjective after the noun, for example, is the rule in french but also correct and common in polish).

Or he had a ghostwriter.

Conrad leaps to mind, of course.

where would the grammar mistakes and accidental polonisms have come from if he had a ghostwriter? did he find another guy who knew polish and french better than english to write his books for him?

Me

Also me

iirc, he was ETL (third language) since he knew French before English which is fucking nuts considering the brilliance of his prose (although florid at times)