To be rather more populist, though I do think him a wonderful writer, how about Terry Pratchett? He uses his created world to say the unsayable about our own rather than to create a mythology and is delightfully irreverent but discworld is the only "created world" that has a fraction of the appeal of Arda.
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“But Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Eldamar.”
Christopher Tolkien, Requiescat in pace
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