Katherine Heiny: ‘Writing about sex and relationships ends up being about infidelity’

Swallowed hearing aids, origami obsessives and a husband who’s a former MI6 agent ... Standard Deviation author Katherine Heiny isn’t short of inspiration, so why did it take 25 years to get her writing career off the ground?

‘I love nothing more than making people cry’: author Cheryl Strayed on her hugely moving TV show

Profound, big-hearted, and raw, the adaptation of bestselling book Tiny Beautiful Things is powerful television. Its writer talks grief, sorrow and being friends for life with Reese Witherspoon

‘We’re in a golden age for microbes’: the man rewriting history from the perspective of germs

Forget ‘great men’ – infection and disease are the really important forces in the development of humankind, believes public health specialist Jonathan Kennedy

Mikhail Shishkin: ‘The main enemy of Russian culture is the Russian regime’

The revered Russian writer and Putin critic on how the war in Ukraine has divided his nation, and why culture is the only cure

Writer Rachel Hewitt: ‘Running is fundamentally important to me, physically and emotionally’

As her book about women’s fight to access the great outdoors is published, the writer and academic talks about the joy that running gives her and why she won’t be put off by harassment

Catherine Lacey: ‘That constant nervous Twitter energy repels me’

The American novelist, whose latest work is a fake biography of an avant-garde artist, on growing up in Mississippi and why her fiction has ‘never actively involved cellphones or the internet’

Andrew Marr: ‘I’ve had an incredibly good decade since my stroke’

The journalist, 63, on his excellent recovery, Maoist youth and the increasing mendacity of politicians

‘Making a book is an extraordinary thing’: Pip Williams on the invisible history of female bookbinders

The bestselling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words shares the spark behind her new novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho – filling the ‘blank spaces’ around the women who worked at Oxford University Press

Novelist Naomi Alderman: ‘When I’m feeling distressed I go very intellectual. Which is a defence’

As her hit feminist novel, The Power, becomes a TV series, the writer talks about dark episodes in her past that underpin her work, and how she is inspired by a new generation of women

Karl Geary: ‘I was writing out of confusion and horror, rage and love’

The actor turned novelist on creating authentic working-class characters, swapping Dublin for New York aged 16, and why sewing is like writing

Diana Evans: ‘The Tory rhetoric asks us to forget, I’m trying to make sure that we don’t’

Five years on from her acclaimed novel Ordinary People, the writer returns to explore the lives of black British Londoners. She talks about Grenfell, belonging – and how she writes to bear witness

‘A billion listens? Is that a lot?’ John Cooper Clarke on penning possibly the world’s favourite poem

I Wanna Be Yours, a love poem that rhymes Ford Cortina with vacuum cleaner, has been a school text and a wedding staple. But now, thanks to TikTok and Arctic Monkeys, it has gone spectacularly global. So who was it written for?

Matthew Desmond: ‘The poverty rate in America and the UK should be zero – and I think we can get there’

For the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Evicted, a heartbreaking study of the American housing crisis, bearing witness was not enough

Mary Beard: ‘Everyone is policing everything, and the left are just as bad as the right’

The classicist on life on the culture wars’ frontline, what she owes her mother – and how pizza shaped her TV career

Richard Milward: ‘I hid my writing like a secret vice’

The novelist on his latest book, a Charles Manson-inspired work written in slang, his love of the band Mogwai and the trials of sorting post for Royal Mail