Since its founding in 1923, Time magazine has been crowning the world’s pioneers and power brokers. The pub’s annual list of most influential people is more than 30 years old. And today, we get the 2026 edition. Though “influential,” is a deliberately slippery metric, the TIME100 list aims to recognize needle-movers. Editors debate entries all year long , using only cultural sway as rubric. As a result, there are actors, doctors, CEOs, chefs, entrepreneurs, activists, athletes, and war criminals represented on the list. There are also three novelists, because literary culture isn’t dead. Here’s who made the cut: Tayari Jones Jones was cited by the author and academic Imani Perry for her “sensitive coming-of-age stories [that] bloom into rich landscapes of Black women’s interior lives.” A bard of Atlanta working within multiple storytelling traditions , Jones also got flowers for nurturing peers in the profession. Her latest novel, Kin , is out now.…