Which author would you love to have dinner with?

Which Author Would You Like to Have Dinner With?
Someone asked me this at a small gathering recently, one of those questions meant to be a light icebreaker, and I found myself pausing longer than the moment probably called for. It’s a deceptively simple question. Not “who’s your favorite author” — that’s easy, that’s a list you can rattle off. This one asks something different: whose company would you actually want. Whose voice, across a table, over a shared meal, would you lean into.
I thought about C.S. Lewis first, honestly. Not just for the Narnia books that shaped so much of my childhood imagination, but for the way he wrote faith without ever making it feel like a lecture. I’d want to ask him how he held onto wonder as an adult, how he kept writing toward mystery instead of settling for easy answers. I think a lot about that in my own life — trying to hold medicine and business and ministry and storytelling all at once, trying to let each one deepen the others instead of competing for space. I imagine he’d have something to say about that kind of layered life.
I also thought about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. There’s something about the way she writes Nigerian life — unflinching, specific, unapologetically ours — that I find myself reaching for as I work on my own novel. I’d want to ask her the practical things: how she trusts a character’s voice when it’s still forming, how she knows when a story set in Lagos is honest versus when it’s performing. But I’d also just want to hear how she thinks about writing home, about writing us, for a world that often only wants a single story about Africa.
If I’m being fully honest, though, I think I’d choose the writer of Ecclesiastes. No name we can put a face to, no biography to research beforehand. Just someone who looked at life fully — the striving, the vanity, the fleeting nature of accomplishment — and still landed somewhere close to peace. Somewhere close to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” I think about that book more than people realize. Building things — a company, a foundation, a mentorship program, a novel, a medical career — can quietly become its own form of chasing wind if I’m not careful. I’d want to sit with whoever wrote those words and ask how they made peace with effort and meaning at the same time.
Maybe that’s what this question is really getting at. It’s not really about the author. It’s about who you want to borrow wisdom from, even for one meal. Who you trust to speak into the parts of you that are still being written.
So — who would you choose, and why?