Panel of experts charged with listing the fiction that has affected them most goes for bestsellers as well as literary classics

There’s no Wuthering Heights, no Moby-Dick, no Ulysses, but there is Half of a Yellow Sun, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Discworld: so announced the panel of experts assembled by the BBC to draw up a list of 100 novels that shaped their world.

The choices were made by Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Syima Aslam, founder of the Bradford literature festival, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith and journalist Mariella Frostrup. The list is intended to mark the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, widely seen as the progenitor of the English-language novel.

The books chosen by the panel are those that have made a personal impact on them, and are divided into 10 categories. These include “love, sex and romance”, which features titles ranging from Jilly Cooper’s Rivals to Judy Blume’s Forever; “identity”, which moves from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; and “adventure”, which includes Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

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“So many amazing novels are not on the list,” said Dawson. “As this panel of judges, we’re not qualified to say this is the definitive list, but we are qualified to say these are our favourites. We knew right from the beginning that the role of these lists, almost, is for people to disagree with them … and we could only pick 100 books.”

So while there’s no Wuthering Heights, the Brontë sisters do feature on the list with Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And while Moby-Dick doesn’t appear, Herman Melville does – with Bartleby, the Scrivener.

“I hope people look at the list and recognise how we have allowed the emotions behind a novel to factor into our choices, not how many copies it’s sold, or if it’s considered a work of great literature,” said Dawson. “A novel only really matters in its relation to its reader … I’ll never forget reading [Pullman’s] The Subtle Knife in the Pavilion Garden in Brighton. I was crying, and a woman came over and asked if I was alright – she’d seen what I was reading and knew where I was up to.”

She added that she had pushed for more children’s and young adult titles to be included on the list, “because if it weren’t for the books we loved as children, we wouldn’t be readers as adults”. So alongside Orlando, Middlemarch and Our Mutual Friend, the list also features The Witches, The Hunger Games, Noughts and Crosses and The Earthsea trilogy.

BBC Arts director Jonty Claypole said the list took “months of enthusiastic debate” to put together. “There are neglected masterpieces, irresistible romps as well as much-loved classics. It is a more diverse list than any I have seen before, recognising the extent to which the English-language novel is an art form embraced way beyond British shores,” he said.

The unveiling of the list launches a year-long celebration of literature at the BBC, headed by the new BBC Two series Novels That Shaped Our World. Beginning on 9 November, the series will explore the novel from the perspective of women’s voices, the empire and working-class experience.

• This article was amended on 6 November 2019. An earlier version incorrectly said that the list marked the “200th anniversary” of the publication of Robinson Crusoe.