Susie Dent: ‘English has always evolved by mistake’

The queen of Countdown’s dictionary corner on the power of positive language and finding joy in ‘mubble fubbles’

The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst: ‘Goth is about being in love with the melancholy beauty of existence’

The band’s co-founder on reconciling with Robert Smith and the real meaning of the dark music subculture

Sunday with Adele Parks: ‘I might sit down to write, with cats sprawled on my keyboard’

The novelist describes tells Nick McGrath that kale smoothies are nice actually, enjoys a spicy margarita and praises her feline assistants Gorgeous and Fabulous

Maureen Freely: ‘Turkey is a place where writers matter’

The author and academic on her exploration of a ‘dark chapter’ in Turkish history, how working as a translator changed her view of the world, and her long friendship with novelist Orhan Pamuk

‘I didn’t think it was possible to be a novelist’: Julian Barnes on literature, loss – and his late friend Martin Amis

The Booker winning author talks about how his most recent work was inspired by Hilary Mantel, and the way the books world has changed since his debut was published more than 40 years ago

A haunted life: how Danny Robins became Britain’s high priest of the paranormal

Once a struggling comedy writer, he is now a highly successful podcast presenter and playwright. His secret? Ghosts

Porn addicts, vicars, madmen and murderers: Sarah Ogilvie on the Oxford English Dictionary’s unlikely writers

In a 70-year crowdsourcing project, a motley global public sent in the words and definitions that would form the first OED. Ogilvie reveals the shocking stories behind the book’s birth

The new queen of spy fiction: how Ava Glass went from murder reporting to the bestseller list

The author started out covering crime in the US before getting a close-up view of the British security services. She remembers her first dead body and a strange encounter with a fake friend

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