Richard Ford: ‘I just make up shit to worry about at 3am’

The Pulitzer-winning US author on his fifth and final Frank Bascombe novel, why Donald Trump won’t get re-elected, his country’s gun culture and the death of his friend Martin Amis

Lorrie Moore: ‘I’m just cruel. What can I tell you?’

The cult US author talks about losing her father during the pandemic, deadpan comedy – and why she wrote her long-awaited new novel in secret

How to avoid a civil war, by the man who predicted Trump

Across the west, popular misery and ‘elite overproduction’ are fuelling crisis, argues data-driven historian Peter Turchin. So what can we do to turn things around?

Elliot Page on Juno, Hollywood’s dark side and coming out twice: ‘Living my life was more important than being in movies’

When the feelgood movie made him an Oscar-nominated star, the strain of hiding who he was almost forced him to quit acting. He explains how opening up about being gay, then trans, saved his life

Ocean Vuong: ‘I don’t believe a writer should just keep writing as long as they’re alive’

The award-winning poet and author on bringing his career to a meaningful end, processing the death of his mother via verse, and his love of mixed martial arts

Brandon Taylor: ‘Writing is the most fun I’m capable of having’

The American author talks about growing up queer in a family of ‘wolves’, poverty and class in the US, and the 19th-century writers who inspired his latest novel

‘It looked like Chauvin would get away with it’: Minnesota’s top attorney on how he won justice for George Floyd’s family

Keith Ellison secured a rare conviction of a police officer for an on-duty death but saw wider reform stall

Paul Murray: ‘I just dumped all my sadness into the book’

The Irish novelist on his wife’s response to his darkly comic new book, the ghosts that haunt his country, his love of Thomas Pynchon and distrust of Dickens

‘I used to say awful things’: Alan Carr on divorce, dating and the skit that haunts him

He’s the extrovert who used to pick on others for laughs. But after struggling in lockdown and a bruising separation, the comic insists he’s grown up – and is happier than ever

International Booker winner Georgi Gospodinov: ‘My dystopian novel became real’

The Bulgarian writer opens up about the political fears that informed his prize-winner Time Shelter, about ‘a Pandora’s box of weaponised nostalgia’

Pete Brown – the final interview: ‘Music gives you a focus, you can see a goal ahead’

A jazz poet and countercultural hero who wrote lyrics for Cream, Brown died last week aged 82. In this interview at sessions last month for his final LP, he explained why he was making art until the end

‘If it’s not a risk… it’s nothing’: Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux on her unapologetic career

The French writer transforms her own life into uncompromising autofiction. With new translations, a film, and unwavering activism, the 82-year-old is living life to the full

M John Harrison: ‘I want to be the first human to imitate ChatGPT’

The titan of literary science fiction on AI hype, writing his ‘anti-memoir’, and his take on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Nazir Afzal: ‘Prosecutor by day, DJ by night. That was me in the early 90s’

The lawyer and author, 61, tells Michael Segalov about family tragedies, legal role models, bigoted cops and the Camden trance scene

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask’

The bestselling author of Babel and the the Poppy War trilogy on her new satire of the publishing industry and why she won’t write in the same genre twice