: How important is education for an author? By education I do not mean to ask how important a degree in English is for an author. A literate person, without any formal education, could pen an

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Importance for what? For success? If so how is that measure? Are you referring to becoming a NY time best seller? I'll assume you are.

Look at authors like George RR Martin or JK Rowling or Stephanie Meyer or EL James or christopher Paolini . Some of them write great, others, not so much. Yet they all have sold massive amounts of books.

JK Rowling has a Bachelors of Arts degree; Martin has a MS in Journalism, Meyer has a bachelors as well, and James has some college but not an actual degree.
All have a some degree of higher education and I think it can be seen in their writing ability yet all are fairly successful. Christohper Paolini is a rare exception with only a home schooled education, though he has taken other courses.

In short it doesn't seem to matter from a sales perspective. However from a literary perspective I think it does matter to some degree.

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Formal education beyond the basic education you would get in school in a developed country is not particularly useful, in my opinion, unless you want to write in a very literary style. In that case, a English Literature degree or something similar may be modestly useful.

Beyond basic literacy at the level you can get in a good school, you're really better off accumulating direct life experience. That is not to say that having degrees is not important and useful - they are critical if you want to get a half-way decent job in a modern economy. But they are not very useful for a writer, per se. To be clear, any writer will probably need some job besides writing, and he will probably need a degree (or degrees) for that job.

Two of my favorite writers, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), and H. G. Wells, had little formal education. Blair went to school at Eton and got a school leaving certificate, but had no formal education beyond that. He then did a variety of things, including spending time in the British Imperial police in Burma, which he used as background in his novel "Burmese Days". Wells came from a poor background, and had some sort of patchy school education, but it was not even the equivalent of a good modern school education as one might find in a developed country these days. Neither seem to have been too concerned about their lack of formal education, with regards to their writing, anyway.

By way of counterpoint, another favorite writer of mine, the English novelist and literary critic David Lodge, has extensive formal education and an academic background, including a PhD in English (in 1967) from Birmingham University, and a professorship also at Birmingham, which he has made much use of in his novels. And certainly his prose style and themes owes much to his formal literary background. So certainly an academic background can be useful for a novelist, but it isn't critical. Other kinds of background are useful too.

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