Mystery meat and maggot-infested produce: the disturbing reality of US prison food

In Eating Behind Bars, author Leslie Soble details how food is used to further punish incarcerated people in the US

‘You don’t really see it in fiction’: how one novelist brought ‘Detty December’ party season back from Ghana

Jessica Carmichael’s coming-of-age YA novel is set during the huge annual diasporic return to west Africa, which ‘changed the trajectory’ of her life

‘What other silences filled my childhood?’: Tareq Baconi on excavating his queer and Palestinian identities

In his memoir, the author recalls the boy he loved while growing up in Jordan – and weaves the tale with his family’s history of dispossession

There’s a new space race – will the billionaires win?

The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose

Not just love, actually: why romance fiction is booming

From Emily Henry to Rebecca Yarros and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – romance has dominated the book charts this year. So why is it still dismissed by critics?

From Dr Seuss to All Quiet on the Western Front: 19 books to help you find hope, sense and resistance in difficult times

Writers, activists and politicians on the books they turn to for wisdom and perspective – and to restore their faith in human nature

‘There’s a sense of our freedoms becoming vulnerable’: novelist Alan Hollinghurst

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

Scott Galloway on the masculinity crisis: ‘I worry we are evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial males’

When his book Notes on Being a Man was released last month, it raced to the top of the bestseller lists. The US author, tech entrepreneur and podcaster explains his theories on dating, crying – and the rise of Donald Trump

‘I took literary revenge against the people who stole my youth’: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

‘If I was American, I’d be worried about my country’: Margaret Atwood answers questions from Ai Weiwei, Rebecca Solnit and more

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

‘I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t’: Karl Ove Knausgård on the fallout from My Struggle and the dark side of ambition

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Can ceramics be demonic? Edmund de Waal’s obsession with a deeply disturbing Dane

The great potter explains why he turned his decades-long fixation with Axel Salto – maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show

‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh, his astounding Booker prize-winner

The novel’s protagonist is violent, libidinous and so inarticulate he says ‘OK’ some 500 times. So how did the author turn his story into a tragic masterpiece?

‘Erin Patterson remains mysterious to me’: Helen Garner, Sarah Krasnostein and Chloe Hooper on the mushroom murders

Three of Australia’s most acclaimed writers have teamed up to write The Mushroom Tapes, about the weeks they spent at the triple-murder trial, picking apart lies, media ethics and evil

‘I’m never surprised when I read about a woman murdering a man’: Helen Garner on her Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries

Her first book outraged Australian critics – but now she’s scooped the UK’s top nonfiction prize. She talks about female anger, becoming cool at 82 – and why winning made her feel like a stunned mullet