Author Coco Mellors: ‘I needed from the book something that I needed in my life – a sense of hope’

Blue Sisters, the novelist’s follow-up to her debut Cleopatra and Frankenstein, focuses on death and addiction. She explains how she found her way to a more optimistic story

‘The only healing will be through justice’: Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza on femicide in Mexico

Through writing about her sister Liliana’s murder 30 years ago, the author found a community of those whose female friends and family members had also been killed. Yet the authorities still fail to act

‘My own inner critic is a bully’: Julia Cameron on creative demons and updating The Artist’s Way

Creativity guru Julia Cameron has long inspired others. Now she’s sharing her own secret weapon

‘Money pervades everything’: the psychotherapist delving into our deep anxiety about finances

Do you find it hard to budget or, conversely, difficult to spend? Vicky Reynal reveals what our financial choices reveal about our psyches – and what can be done to ease our money worries

Paul Lynch: ‘When you win the Booker, you are told you won’t write for a year’

The Irish novelist on navigating success shortly after a cancer diagnosis and a marriage breakdown, the renaissance in Irish writing, and how his ‘tragic worldview’ fits the times

‘I was in a kind of ecstatic freefall’: artist Miranda July on writing the book that could change your life

The artist and filmmaker has always enjoyed challenging convention. Now she has written a novel which takes a breathtaking look at menopause, sex, death and transformation

‘I don’t want to cancel him’: Rose Boyt on confronting the gaze of her father, Lucian Freud

The artist’s daughter talks about her chaotic childhood, writing truthfully about her dad, and the books she read to him on his deathbed

Deborah Levy: ‘Writing and swimming help each other’

The novelist and memoirist on stamina and solitude, the influence of surrealist art on her work, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s revelatory travel writing

The Ministry of Time author Kaliane Bradley: ‘It was just so much fun’

A nerdy literary parlour game that started in lockdown has turned into one of the most-hyped debuts of the year - soon to be a series on BBC1. Its author talks about how her obsession with a long-dead polar explorer helped her find a way to write about family trauma

‘I have my iPhone, X and a brain in my head’: Ukrainian journalist and social media star Illia Ponomarenko

Ahead of the publication of his raw account of the Russian invasion, the reporter talks about capturing the conflict in real time – and when the war will come to an end

‘This is much more intimate’: Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn, 15 years on

The Irish author on the follow-up to his bestselling novel, being blanked at the Oscars and the joys of giving up drinking

‘I did not know the life I have now was a possibility’: Gemma Rolls-Bentley on her history of queer art

After two decades creating pioneering exhibitions, the curator decided to publish a ‘sexy coffee table book’ bringing together work made for clubs and protests as much as galleries

If you live to 100, you might as well be happy: what poverty, jail and war have taught author Rhee Kun Hoo

Joy is all around us, according to the bestselling South Korean author. Here’s what he has learned from a long and often hard life

Anne Lamott on love, sobriety and reaching 70: ‘All I’ve learned, I’ve learned because the abyss swallowed me’

The American author’s 20th book reads as a series of parables on grace. In an interview, she reflects on a life she thought she wouldn’t get to live

Read me a story: why reading out loud is a joy for adults as well as kids

Sarah Manavis and her partner have a guilty secret. What they love to do most of all in private is… read out loud to each other. And, as she’s discovered, it has many surprising benefits