The general consensus today is that a writer in any medium must have an online presence. At the very least, they should have a website. Regardless of the caliber, all of the new writers, it seems, have a website/blog, and a twitter and facebook account for professional purposes (with some rare exceptions). Sometimes these are run by other people, but the illusion that the writers themselves are posting their thoughts and updates is there. I started researching Salman Rushdie, who is speaking at the Brooklyn Book Festival next week, and was surprised to see he had no online presence whatsoever. What was even more surprising was that he is not alone. Here is a list of 10 pretty big names in the literature world without even a website:

1. Salman Rushdie
British-Indian novelist most famous for his fourth novel The Satanic Verses in 1988 because of the fatwa and death threat he received and even had a failed assasination attempt in 1989. He has won numerous awards for his novels and essays. Some of his famous novels include Midnight’s Children, Grimus, and The Enchantress of Florence.

2. Alice Munro
Canadian short-story writer who is one of the few able to make a career out of writing just short-stories. She is the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work and was a contender for the Nobel Prize.

3. John Updike
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. His main claim to fame is his Rabbit series and has won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction more than once.

4. Jhumpa Lahiri
Indian American author who wrote a collection of depressing stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Namesake was adapted into a film which starred Kal Penn, Tabu, Irrfan Khan, and directed by Mira Nair. Her real name or “good name” is Nilanjana Sudeshna and is currently on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

5. Steve Yarbrough
I couldn’t not put my homie and creative writing professor on this list. Born in Indianola, Mississippi and an avid football fan, Steve Yarbrough was my thesis director at California State University, Fresno. All of his writing is set in Loring, Mississippi and his style is within the Southern tradition. He has written a few short-story collections, but is most well knows for the novels Safe From Neighbors (2010), The End of California (2006), Prisoners of War (2004), Visible Spirits (2001) and The Oxygen Man (1999). After spending several years teaching at California State University, Fresno, he now teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

6. Akhil Sharma
Indian-American author  who studied public policy at Princeton, but also took some writing classes under writers like Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates. He won several O. Henry prizes after being a Stegner Fellow at Stanford’s writing program and then went off to law school. He is the author of An Obedient Father and has had many of his stories published in leading magazines like the New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

7. Johnathan Franzen
An American novelist and essayist who writes about the “post modern” family. His third novel, The Corrections, received numerous awards, earning him the National Book Award. The book was also selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club after which he made some controversial comments and wrote an essay ridiculing the idea that our society looked to Oprah to suggest “best-sellers.”

8. Joyce Carol Oates
She is most well known for her short-stories, but has written over fifty novels since 1963.  Since 2008, she has been an instructor at Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program.

9. V.S. Naipaul
A British-Trinidadian novelist and essayist. He has won countless awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He is much more famous for openly admitting to visiting prostitutes and cheating on his wife. He is the author of A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and Guerrillas.

10. Kazuo Ishiguro
British-Japanese author who has received four Man Booker Prizes to his name. His two most celebrated works are Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He has also written a handful of short-stories. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982) is narrated by a Japanese widow living in England haunted by the horrors of Nagasaki. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.