It seems to happen every once in a while: an new talent bursts on to the literary scene, only to fall back into obscurity without apparently ever fulfilling his or her promise.

This melancholy thought was prompted by a recent Guardian article by novelist Jane Smiley, in which she named William Fain's Harmony as one of her favourite horse-racing stories.

Despite writing numerous novels and being published in the New Yorker, Fain seems to have been completely wiped from the collective literary memory since his suicide at the age of 40 in between delivery and publication of his final novel, A Sporting Life, in 1961. Google his name and see for yourself.

Or what about Joan Samson? Her sole novel, The Auctioneer, sold millions of copies and was met with critical acclaim, but both the book and the author appear to have been widely forgotten.

Some might argue that it was Samson's fault for neglecting to publish again - but they're reckoning without one-book wonders such as Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird has never been out of print.

So, in a spirit of discovery, I'm starting my own literary resurrection campaign and I'm going to open it by staking a claim for Timothy Mo, the Hong Kong-based novelist who made a huge splash with his first few novels, then fell into self-publishing and obscurity with his next ones. He seems to have started to drag himself out of the doldrums with Pure last year, but I think more people should read him.

There must be hundreds of other examples. So give us chapter on verse on the forgotten writers you think we should all be rediscovering.