Gabriel García Márquez is a very popular writer who is considered to be a good writer. I personally don't like his writing style but there are a lot of people who do like him.

Milan Kundera is a fantastic living writer. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a wonderful, insightful book. The movie was awful.

Most people who like fantasy and science fiction have at least heard of Umberto Eco, a brilliant writer who has touched on esoteric topics in The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

I enjoy Viktor Pelevin, a Russian writer who has been translated into English, although there is a bit of a pop-philosophy feel to his books that keeps me ambivalent about whether or not he's really a good writer or not.

When one looks at writers that have died within the past 20 years or so, the list expands considerably. Naguib Mahfouz is popular again following the Egyptian revolution, Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange is far better than the movie of the same name, and I would not hesitate to recommend Hunter S. Thompson, particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Curse of Lono (though the former is his best known work).

As for where I rank "classic" writers, my own personal list of authors I like is based more on the classics that I found to be accessible. Some authors I did not like at all (Steinbeck, any Bronte sister, Gunter Grass). Others I think are pure genius (Pasternak, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Wilde, Flaubert, Mann, Thackeray, Dante, Molière, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Hesse, Orwell, Huxley). Then there are those that I can appreciate in some sense but not in others (like Joyce, Kerouac, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dumas, Cervantes, Salinger).