We've been talking to the authors shortlisted for the Guardian first book award on the Books podcast. First up was Ned Beauman, who confessed that he began the research for his novel about a Nazi beetle on Wikipedia. This week we talked to Nadifa Mohamed about her griot novel, Black Mamba Boy, and also about the list she gave us of the authors who had shaped her writing. She cited "Ahmadou Kourouma for his ability to combine African forms of storytelling with European, but also Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Claude McKay and Dylan Thomas for the beauty and music in their writing".

It's a set of writers which helps to explain Black Mamba Boy's unusual structure, steeped in the praise-singing tradition of West Africa, and which also set us all thinking. What riches can we find beyond the long shadow of Shakespeare and Dickens, Bellow and Updike?

So when she came into the studio, we challenged Mohamed, along with the publisher and journalist Margaret Busby and the deputy editor of Granta magazine, Ellah Allfrey, to come up with a literary canon all of their own. They were quick to agree that it should be diverse not only culturally and historically, but generically. Here it is:

1. Banjo, by Claude Mckay (1889-1948)

2. The Black Jacobins, by CLR James (1901-1989)

3. Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

4. The Murderer, by Roy Heath (1926-2008)

5. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, by Ahmadou Kourouma (1927-2003)

6. Song of Lawino, by Okot p'Bitek (1931-1982)

7. Salt, by Earl Lovelace (1935- )

8. Kindred, by Octavia Butler (1947-2006)

9. House of Hunger, by Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987)

10. Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977- ) 

You can hear their discussions on this week's podcast, but the furious disputes over the omission of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children show that this is far from a definitive list. Definitive lists be damned – what would you put in your canon for a new century?