‘I just wanted to write something funny for my friends’: Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby

Her novel caused a storm when it was longlisted for the Women’s prize, and is one of the most talked-about of the year. She talks to a writer and trans dad about LGBTQ+ families and the ‘Sex and the City problem’

‘I saw something in Bruce Springsteen that nobody else saw’: the world according to Stevie Van Zandt

The Boss’s trusty sideman has many plans – from saving central America to TV Hogmanay at the Playboy Mansion – and he’s more than happy to share his rock wisdom

‘My intimacy with Simone de Beauvoir was unique… it was love’

As an autobiographical novel by the writer is published for the first time in English, her adopted daughter Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir talks about their bond

Paul Auster: ‘It’s distress that generates art’

The novelist on his latest work, an 800-page tribute to the American author Stephen Crane, and why the greatest writers are monomaniacs

Stephanie Alexander on eating with pleasure: ‘My remit is to go on trying to convince people’

She may play companion to half a million Australian cooks, but Stephanie Alexander still fears for our culinary future

Jimmy Carr on booze, taxes and being a virgin at 26: ‘Do I sound like an incel elder?’

The controversial comic’s new book is a surprising mix of memoir and self-help. Has having a baby softened his edges? He talks about depression, anxiety, punching down and his friend Sean Lock

Nigel Kennedy on his Classic FM fight: ‘Hendrix is like Beethoven, Vivaldi is more Des O’Connor’

Fresh from a bust-up with ‘Jurassic FM’ over playing Hendrix, the violinist talks about musical snobbery, going on strike and his lifelong regret at turning Duke Ellington down

Eileen Atkins: ‘There are plenty of parts if you’re willing to make yourself look lousy’

From council estate in Tottenham to West End stage, the veteran actor and screenwriter tells her life story in a funny and honest new memoir

‘American democracy will continue to be tested’: Peril author Robert Costa on Trump, the big lie and 2024

Washington Post reporter calls co-authoring book on end of Trump presidency with Watergate legend Bob Woodward a ‘privilege’

David Olusoga: ‘Black people were told that they had no history’

The historian and TV presenter on the story of former slave Olaudah Equiano and the significance of Black History Month

Jonathan Franzen: ‘I just write it like I see it and that gets me in trouble’

Twenty years on from The Corrections, America’s most lauded author is back. But will he put his foot in it again?

Wole Soyinka: ‘This book is my gift to Nigeria’

The Nobel laureate has produced plays, poems, essays and even inspired a pop duo but he hasn’t written a novel for nearly half a century - until now

Parish council Zoom ​star Jackie Weaver:​ ‘Do not underestimate how averse I am to conflict’

The unlikely viral phenomenon on handling sudden fame and dealing with difficult people, including her mother

Mary Beard: ‘If we want to understand what we went through in the pandemic, we need the arts’

The classicist on owning her TV image, dealing with internet trolls, and why her new book on Roman emperors sheds light on our preoccupation with statues

Anthony Doerr: ‘Rather than write what I know, I write what I want to know’

The Pulitzer winner on why his new novel is partly set in medieval Constantinople, the Netflix adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See and his childhood love of the Narnia books