Beth Mead: ‘I told Saka just to curtsy when he sees me!’

The Arsenal and England footballer on her MBE, her terrible singing voice – and the best and worst year of her life

‘Dark side of the human spirit’: Stephen Bright’s death penalty fight

Doyen of death row lawyers releases The Fear of Too Much Justice, a book named for a famous supreme court dissent

Ashleigh Nugent: ‘Black stories were always about London’

The writer on the long gestation of Locks – his debut novel set in 90s Merseyside – his work in prisons and what Virginia Woolf has taught him

Writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths: ‘There’s a strength you don’t realise you have access to’

The novelist on inheriting her mother’s ferocity, gun violence in the US and the attack on her husband, Salman Rushdie, last year

Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Rural people are so angry they want to blow up the system’

The first author to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice on how Charles Dickens – and rage about the opioid crisis – helped her write ‘the great Appalachian novel’

Adele Bertei: ‘We did all the things rock’n’roll boys would be lionised for’

The creator of the first all-female openly queer rock band talks about her memoir and why the music scene wasn’t ready for her

James Comey: ‘I’d like to take readers inside the White House’

The former FBI director, who was sacked by Donald Trump, on parallels between the ex-president and mafia bosses, why he would never run for office, and his new crime thriller

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