Author Mick Herron: ‘I’d have made an awful spy. I don’t have a smartphone or wifi’

As he publishes a new standalone novel, the spotlight-shunning author of the Slow Horses books talks about politics, time-travel and identity-swapping

Adam Nathaniel Furman: ‘I like the senses to be tickled’

The British artist and designer, whose work spans Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and a Bristol underpass, is redefining public spaces with an outsider’s eye for the monumental and an emphasis on craft and delight

Olga Ravn: ‘Learning how to love a child isn’t something that happens in a second’

The Danish author on her new hybrid novel about maternal ambivalence, her debt to Doris Lessing, and attempting to read Freud aged 10

On my radar: Naomi Klein’s cultural highlights

The Canadian author and activist on the self-deprecating comedy of Mae Martin, a mind-altering memoir, and the singer she drove miles to see live

Geri Halliwell-Horner: ‘Through the Spice Girls people saw that they could be themselves’

This singer and writer, 51, on the Spice Girls, white-water rafting – and aiming for Oxford University

‘The Iliad may be ancient – but it’s not far away’: Emily Wilson on Homer’s blood-soaked epic

Following her acclaimed translation of the Odyssey, Wilson has turned to Homer’s other, darker poem. She explains how she got stuck for six months – and why it speaks to today’s era of conflict

Poet Shane McCrae: ‘They kidnapped me to get me away from Blackness’

At the age of three, the author was taken from his father and raised by his racist maternal grandparents, who told him he was white. He reveals how writing gave him the confidence to confront the lies he grew up with

Richard Osman: ‘I would have been terrible in MI6. I’m too tall, spill secrets and can’t lie’

After getting ‘the tap’ at Cambridge, he went from a behind-the-scenes TV ideas man to a fixture in front of the camera. Then the Pointless star’s Thursday Murder Club books became the biggest thing in fiction since Harry Potter

‘We have to come to grips with history’: Robert P Jones on The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy

The US scholar finds the source of Trump’s racist appeal – and current culture wars over the teaching of the American past – in papal doctrine and deadly Christian certainties

From quadruple amputee to much-loved DJ: ‘Resilience is a buzzword that annoys me’

After contracting meningococcal at 19, Tom Nash spent 18 painful months in hospital having his limbs amputated. Two decades later, ‘DJ Hookie’ explains why his experience left him better off

Jewelle Gomez: the Black lesbian writer who changed vampire fiction – and the world

Her first novel was turned down by several publishers, then embraced by a feminist press. As an author, poet, playwright and activist, she has continued to claim space for queer storytellers

‘It’s time the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo grew up’: Karin Smirnoff on her shocking sequel

The Swede is the first woman to write a Lisbeth Salander novel. She explains what men don’t get about sexual violence, why she introduced a genius niece – and how writing beats chopping wood for a living

This ‘bum-poo-fart author’ is Australia’s biggest writer: Andy Griffiths on ending the Treehouse books

The children’s author who has sold millions of funny (and disgusting) books talks about challenging nervous adults and being married to his editor Jill

Claire Keegan: ‘I can’t explain my work. I just write stories’

The much-acclaimed Irish author of Small Things Like These on her quietly devastating new story and why George Saunders wouldn’t read it aloud for a podcast

‘He’s my own Dark Knight’: TV’s new sleuth, invented by a Bradford pharmacist

It took Amit Dhand years to create the British Asian detective Harry Virdee. Now he’s coming to the small screen