What do we mean when we describe books as inspirational? For the faithful, the great religious texts like the Bible and the Koran provide daily inspiration. However, there are plenty of other books which are, in very different ways, life-changing. Novels which transform our ideas about human possibilities. Biographies and memoirs which celebrate the achievements of extraordinary individuals. Polemical works of non-fiction which oblige us to alter our views of the world or of human society. These are the books that the team at Writers' & Artists' Yearbook have sought to identify in their list of 50 inspirational books. What other ‘inspirational books’ are there and how have these inspired your writing? There are hundreds of books which have, over the centuries, proved to be life-changing but they have chosen 50, both fiction and non-fiction, which they believe can be so described.

The 50 books listed below have inspired and changed the lives of many. Which book has inspired you the most? One from this list, perhaps, or something completely different? Let Rod know!

1. Maya Angelou — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The first of Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography records the traumas and tribulations of her upbringing in the American Deep South during the 1930s. Poignantly recording her struggle to forge her own identity and to triumph over the obstacles of being black and poor in a racist society, this is a book that repays reading and re-reading.

2. Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice
Two rich and marriageable young men arrive in the neighbourhood and throw the Bennet household of mother, father and five daughters into confusion. Misunderstandings and self-will conspire to keep apart hero Mr D'Arcy and heroine Elizabeth Bennet but true love finally triumphs.

3. The Bhagavad Gita
One of Hinduism's most sacred texts, the Bhagavad Gita takes the form of a dialogue between the god Krishna and the hero Arjuna on the eve of a climactic battle in which the forces of good face those of evil. Krishna leads Arjuna on the path to wisdom, unfolding truths about the nature of reality and the relationship between the human and divine before finally revealing an awe-inspiring vision of the cycles of the universe.

4. Alain de Botton — The Consolations of Philosophy
Novelist and essayist Alain de Botton takes six philosophers (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and gives them a new relevance to the conduct of our own everyday lives. Problems that can afflict us all (being poor, being unpopular, losing the love of one's life) are viewed through the prism of great thinkers from the past.

5. Charlotte Bronte — Jane Eyre
Governess Jane Eyre falls in love with her employer, the brooding Mr Rochester, but cannot marry him because of the dark secrets from his past that still haunt him. Charlotte Bronte's famous novel transcends the romantic melodrama of its plot to create a powerful portrait of a woman brought to maturity by the obstacles placed in the path of her love.

6. Lewis Carroll — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Surreal before the word was invented, the fantasies of a shy Oxford mathematics don have become classics of children's literature. Alice's encounters with the Cheshire Cat and the March Hare, her experiences at the Mad Hatter's tea party and her attendance at the trial of the knave of hearts for stealing some tarts liberate the reader's imagination in a way few other works can do.

7. Paulo Coelho — The Alchemist
Subtitled 'A Fable About Following Your Dreams', Coelho's heartening story of an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of a treasure in a far off land and sets off in search of it has become an international bestseller. Santiago's meeting with the alchemist who becomes his guru opens his eyes to the true values of life, love and suffering.

8. Louis de Bernieres — Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
War comes to the Greek island of Cephalonia in the unlikely shape of amiable, music-loving Italian soldier, Captain Antonio Corelli, and his men. The gentlemanly invader embarks on an intense love affair with Pelagia, the daughter of the local doctor, but the real horrors of war draw ever closer to the island and ordinary people are caught up in the larger forces of history.

9. Charles Dickens — David Copperfield
Dickens's most autobiographical novel takes its eponymous hero from an unhappy childhood through infatuation and loss to fulfilment as a writer and the joys of true love. Memorable characters abound, from Mr. Micawber to Uriah Heep, but the book's greatest success is to show Copperfield's own journey to maturity.

10. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
Enigmatic and fabulously wealthy, Jay Gatsby throws wild and legendary parties while yearning for the love of the elusive Daisy Buchanan. Narrator Nick Carraway observes Gatsby's ineluctable descent into tragedy. No book has ever caught so perfectly and precisely the power of the American Dream and the pain of disillusionment.

11. The Diary of Anne Frank
The heart-rending story of how a young Jewish girl from Amsterdam hid with her family from the Nazis until they were found and sent to a concentration camp became an instant classic when it was first published in English in 1952. Half a century later the story of a teenager coming to maturity in the most terrible of circumstances remains profoundly moving.

12. Charles Frazier — Cold Mountain
In the American Civil War, a wounded Confederate veteran struggles against all the odds to return to the mountains of his North Carolina home and to the woman he loves. An odyssey that embodies the persistence of love and the endurance of hope, Cold Mountain is one of the most moving American novels of recent decades.

13. Mahatma Gandhi — An Autobiography
Subtitled 'The Story of My Experiments with Truth', the memoirs of the Indian nationalist leader and advocate of 'satyagraha' or non-violent resistance to oppression reveal how all the experiences of his life shaped his view of the world. There have been few more persuasive advocates of peace than Gandhi.

14. Kahlil Gibran — The Prophet
First written in the 1920s, Gibran's poetic essays on the meaning of life record the wisdom of a mysterious prophet, about to embark on a journey, who has nothing to offer the people gathered to witness his departure but the answers to the questions each of them puts to him. The prophet reveals his thoughts on everything in life from love and marriage to the enigmas of birth and death.

15. Germaine Greer — The Female Eunuch
The wittiest and most pugnacious of all feminist polemics, The Female Eunuch continues to be a liberating read for both women and men, charting the ways in which traditional, patriarchal ideas about the relations between the sexes oppress us all.

16. Mark Haddon — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Christopher Boone is an autistic teenager who decides to emulate his hero Sherlock Holmes when he chances upon the corpse of his neighbour's dog. His investigations lead him towards new truths about his family and himself. Haddon's book is a touching portrait of a boy whose difference marks him out from other people but who struggles in his own unique way to make sense of the world.

17. Joseph Heller — Catch-22
The madness of war has never been better captured than in the pages of Heller's classic novel of US bomber pilots stationed on a Mediterranean island during the Second World War. Damned if they fly their missions and damned if they don't, the men are caught in the vicious circle that is Catch-22. Heller looks at the horrors of violence and invites us to laugh in the dark.

18. Douglas R. Hofstadter — Gödel, Escher, Bach
Hofstadter takes the music of J. S. Bach, the artwork of M. C. Escher and the mathematical theories of Kurt Gödel and weaves them all into an exhilarating examination of the power of human creativity and thought. Breathtaking in its ambition and its ability to cross boundaries, his book is an epic intellectual adventure.

19. John Irving — The World According to Garp
‘In the world according to Garp’ as the novel’s famous final sentence has it, ‘we’re all terminal cases’ but Irving’s epic tragicomedy provides cause for rejoicing and laughter in the face of this truth. As recorded by John Irving, the strange life of T.S. Garp, would-be writer and bastard son of a famous feminist, celebrates the weirdness and the wonder of the world.

20. James Joyce — Ulysses
A single day in the life of a city (Dublin) and two of its inhabitants, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, is anatomised in the minutest detail in Joyce's famous modernist masterpiece. No other novel has ever celebrated the pains and pleasures of the everyday world and the inner life of its characters with such attentiveness, wit and joy in the power of language.

21. C. G. Jung — Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Not so much an autobiography as a record of his developing beliefs about himself and the world, Jung's book describes the spiritual and psychological journey of one remarkable and influential man. According to Jung, 'the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being' and his book does just that.

22. Helen Keller — The Story of My Life
There are few more inspirational lives than that of Helen Keller, the deaf and blind American woman who overcame her disabilities to become an internationally respected writer and political activist. Told in her own words, the story of her life and her rescue from isolation by an endlessly patient teacher provides unforgettable evidence that people can triumph against all the odds.

23. Jack Kerouac — On the Road
Narrator Sal Paradise and his charismatic friend Dean Moriarty hit the road and zigzag across the wide open spaces of America in search of love, sex and enlightenment in Kerouac's classic account of the beat generation's battle against dull convention. Nearly 50 years after its first publication, On the Road remains an essential text for rebels both with and without a cause.

24. Naomi Klein — No Logo
Naomi Klein's fiery but carefully argued assault on the power of brands opens readers' eyes to the often pernicious ways in which modern capitalism works. From sweatshops in Asia to fast food outlets in America, Klein examines all the places where people are exploited for profit and provides a new bible for the anti-globalisation movement.

25. Harper Lee — To Kill a Mocking Bird
Seen through the eyes of his daughter, the narrator Scout, small-town lawyer Atticus Finch battles against the prejudice and racism of the American Deep South as he defends a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white girl. Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a classic portrait of a humane man determined to follow his own principles and of a child learning to recognise the injustices of the adult world.

26. Primo Levi — If This Is a Man
Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian survivor of Auschwitz. In If This is a Man he describes, in clear and careful prose, the terrible events to which he was witness. As a humane testimony to monstrous inhumanity, it has its place among the most important and challenging books of the twentieth century.

27. James Lovelock — Gaia
Lovelock's vision of an earth that is a self-regulating organism in itself provides powerful support for all of us appalled by our reckless assaults on our planetary environment. His daring new model of the world on which we live has only gained greater relevance in the quarter of a century since it was first published.

28. Nelson Mandela — Long Walk to Freedom
The personal testament of one of the moral and political giants of the 20th century, Long Walk to Freedom charts Mandela's journey from prison on Robben Island to the presidency of a new, apartheid-free South Africa. His enduring faith, through years of hardship, that truth and justice could eventually triumph over oppression is humbling.

29. Nadezhda Mandelstam — Hope Against Hope
The first of Nadezhda Mandelstam's two harrowing but ultimately uplifting memoirs of life in Stalinist Russia records the persecution she and her husband, the poet Osip Madelstam, endured. From the tragic story of her husband's slow disintegration and death, she succeeds in creating a masterpiece that bears witness to the ultimate triumph of creativity and the liberated human spirit.

30. Gabriel Garcia Marquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces a firing squad, the extraordinary history of generations of his family unfolds in his mind and on the pages of Marquez' magic-realist masterpiece. Possible and impossible events intertwine, time dissolves and imagination takes precedence in a narrative that renews the potential of fiction to re-invent the world.

31. Yann Martel — Life of Pi
Teenage Piscine Patel, travelling from India to a new life in Canada, becomes the sole human survivor of the wreck of a cargo ship in the Pacific. Sharing a lifeboat with an assortment of animal survivors of the shipwreck, including a large Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, he has time to ponder his fate and his future. Unique and uncategorisable, Martel’s novel mingles elements of old — fashioned adventure stories with meditations on the nature of faith and the value of religion.

32. Margaret Mitchell — Gone with the Wind
The American Civil War is the backdrop for Margaret Mitchell's panoramic lament for the lost glories of the American South and the story of headstrong beauty Scarlett O'Hara and her turbulent relationship with two men, Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler. Few novels have the sweeping power of this epic romance of ordinary lives caught up in the great events of history.

33. Sylvia Nasar — A Beautiful Mind
John Nash was a mathematical genius, one of the pioneers of game theory in the 1950s, who descended into schizophrenia and madness for decades. Sylvia Nasar's moving biography records the slow disintegration of Nash's brilliant mind and his almost miraculous return from the worst depths of mental illness to win a Nobel Prize in 1994.

34. George Orwell — 1984
In a totalitarian future, Winston Smith rebels against the all-powerful Party by conducting a clandestine and illegal love affair and by harbouring thoughts of freedom but is crushed by the forces of oppression. Orwell's dystopian masterpiece has never been surpassed as a warning of the terrible dangers of surrendering our individuality to the state.

35. Boris Pasternak — Dr. Zhivago
The doomed love affair of the idealistic poet and doctor, Yuri Zhivago, and the teacher Lara is played out against the epic backdrop of the Russian Revolution and Civil War in Pasternak's powerful and gripping novel. Human emotions of love and generosity are championed in a world where hatred, division and violence have taken hold.

36. Robert M. Pirsig — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert Pirsig turns the story of a motorcycle trip across America into a personal odyssey in search of what is true, real and valuable in life. Striving to heal the age-old division between science and mysticism, Pirsig's narrator creates a philosophical masterpiece that has the power to change lives.

37. E. Annie Proulx — The Shipping News
Central character Quoyle flees failure and frustration in New York to find love and fulfilment in a small community in Newfoundland in Annie Proulx's witty and original novel. Quoyle's transformation becomes an offbeat celebration of the potential people have for change.

38. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
No writer has done more to inspire young readers with a love for fiction than J.K. Rowling and the first adventure of her bespectacled would-be wizard introduces him (and us) to Hogwarts, the most extraordinary school in the world, and to the assortment of beguiling characters who spend their time there.

39. Antoine de Saint Exupery — The Little Prince
Superficially a simple children's tale about a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara and there meets a 'little prince' who tells him of his strange interplanetary travels, Saint-Exupery's charming fable is filled with wit and wisdom and fuelled by a gentle awareness of the power of love to transform our lives.

40. J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye
Troubled teenager Holden Caulfield, appalled by the phoniness of the adult world, runs away from his boarding school and arrives in New York to contemplate what the future holds for him. Salinger's portrait of adolescent angst strikes a chord with anyone who knows or remembers how confusing growing up can be.

41. John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath
The Joad family is uprooted from its home in Oklahoma and heads for California in the hope of a new life. Amidst the poverty and unemployment of the Great Depression, they struggle to retain their dignity and their solidarity. Steinbeck's great novel reveals his belief in the power of ordinary people to cling to their humanity whatever the hardships they have to suffer.

42. Sun Tzu — The Art of War
Can a Chinese military treatise first written in the 6th century BC still be worth reading? The answer is definitely, 'Yes'. Despite the passage of more than two millennia, Sun Tzu's insights into human behaviour remain as fresh as when they were first written down and his wisdom can be applied not just to the conduct of war but to the way we live our lives today.

43. Amy Tan — The Joy Luck Club
Two generations of Chinese-American women share stories of their lives and struggle to understand the choices that have made them who they are in Amy Tan's bestselling novel. Poetic and imaginative, The Joy Luck Club celebrates the lives of mothers and daughters and their triumphs over pain and loss.

44. Henry David Thoreau — Walden
Henry David Thoreau, a 19th century American writer and intellectual, spent two years living alone in an isolated cabin in the woods by Walden Pool, growing his own food and attending to his own simple needs. Few other works embody so well the American belief in individual freedom and the importance of self-sufficiency and ploughing one's own furrow in life.

45. Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace
Tolstoy's sweeping, panoramic portrait of Russia facing the crisis of Napoleon's invasion of the country is rightly considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Focusing on the three central characters (Pierre Bezuhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostov) but opening out onto a vast canvas peopled by hundreds, War and Peace is a study of an entire society under pressure. All human life really is there.

46. J. R. R. Tolkien — The Lord of the Rings
Good engages evil in an epic struggle in Tolkien's hugely popular and influential fantasy of elves and dwarves, hobbits and human beings coming together to defeat the villainous Sauron and his orc hordes. Tolkien's teeming imagination creates entire worlds with their own geography, languages, customs and histories in a vast book that regularly tops lists of most-loved fiction.

47. Robert Tressell — The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
First published on the eve of the First World War, Robert Tressell's only novel is the story of a group of painters and decorators in Edwardian England and the attempts by the hero Frank Owen to rouse their political awareness and to end their exploitation by the state and by their employers. Poignant and comic by turns, it has probably inspired more English socialists than the complete works of Marx ever did.

48. Anne Tyler — Breathing Lessons
Husband and wife Ira and Maggie Moran drive to the funeral of an old friend and the events of the day reveal the oddities of their marriage and their growing estrangement from their children. Ordinary lives, in all their humdrum poignancy, are celebrated and illuminated in Tyler’s unpretentious, funny and insightful novel.

49. Alice Walker — The Color Purple
Celie, a young black girl in the American Deep South, suffers poverty, rape and the terrors of a violent marriage. Only when she meets the glamorous singer Shug Avery is she able to break out of the trap her life has become and find the love and fulfilment she has always been denied.

50. Virginia Woolf — A Room of One's Own
Based on a series of lectures Woolf gave at Cambridge University, A Room of One's Own is a witty, ironic but passionate plea for the liberty and personal space that artists, especially women, need to make the most of their imagination and creativity.