Physicist Michio Kaku: ‘We could unravel the secrets of the universe’

Quantum computers will transform our world, curing cancer and fixing the climate crisis, says the scientist and sci-fi fan – but can they be made to work?

The trials and triumphs of Sophie Morgan: ‘At 18 I had my hot girl summer. That August I was paralysed’

After a car crash, Morgan knew she was exactly the same person – she just couldn’t walk. But she had to convince everyone else. She explains how she became a forthright campaigner and a successful TV presenter

Frieda Hughes: ‘A crow’s death linked me to all the other losses in my life’

The poet and painter, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, explains how raising a large aviary of rescued birds in the Welsh countryside gave her a new purpose – and fresh pain

Solmaz Sharif: ‘I don’t shy away from hurting the reader’

The Iranian-American poet on puncturing comfort, staying an apostate and her teenage love of RL Stine

The trauma doctor: Gabor Maté on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds

The physician, author and self-help guru came to worldwide prominence when he appeared with Prince Harry last month. He discusses the mind-body connection, the reality of addiction and why trauma can be treated

Xiaolu Guo: ‘It would be tacky to ask: can you forgive me for writing this?’

The Chinese-British author on leaving her family to find creative freedom, the effect on those she writes about in her revealing new book, and the power of Moby-Dick

‘I’m a CBE, I’m poet laureate so I’m clearly not a republican am I?’: Simon Armitage on his radical roots and rock star dreams

When Simon Armitage left his job as a probation worker to become a full-time poet his dad was horrified. Is the former young subversive turned royal appointee now part of the establishment?

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