Waterstones prize winner Elle McNicoll: ‘I never saw autistic girls in books’

The author was repeatedly told that no one wanted to read fun books with disabled heroes. Now she has won the £5,000 Waterstones children’s book prize for her debut, A Kind of Spark

Rumaan Alam: ‘Our cultural response to a crisis was to go shopping’

The author of the apocalyptic novel Leave the World Behind reflects on its parallels with the Covid pandemic, the genius of Lorrie Moore and why he is looking forward to letting his kids run feral outside

Isabel Waidner: ‘Different doesn’t need to be scary. It can be fun’

The writer of experimental fiction on their debt to America’s ‘new narrative’ tradition, the benefits of a German state education, and exploring homophobia through Franz Beckenbauer

‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

The award-winning reporter’s new book considers threats to democracy from the right around the Capitol attack – but his view of those who seek social justice has angered some on the left

International Booker winner David Diop: ‘It’s war that’s savage, not the soldiers’

The author of At Night All Blood Is Black discusses the unheard African voices of the first world war and the inspiration for his violent antihero

‘I don’t want to remember these things’: dark pop poet John Murry on surviving rape, heroin and family strife

The singer-songwriter talks about his adoptive relative William Faulkner, his violent childhood and heroin – and saves a surprise until the end

Brandon Taylor: ‘I grew up reading my aunt’s nursing-home manuals and bodice-rippers’

The Booker-shortlisted novelist on teaching himself to read, critics who say he’s not nice enough to white people, and why the Bible still haunts him

David Eagleman: ‘The working of the brain resembles drug dealers in Albuquerque’

The neuroscientist, broadcaster and author on the evolution of the brain, the mystery of consciousnesss, and why the next generation will be much smarter than us

Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth: ‘Coronavirus has changed us all’

The neuroscientist and psychiatrist explains Zoom fatigue - and why the conditions of the pandemic can induce an ‘altered state’

Meg Mason: ‘Sorrow and Bliss was a post-hope project. I was convinced that no one would ever see it’

A hit in Australia, where she lives, Meg Mason’s novel Sorrow and Bliss tackles marriage and mental health with humour and heart. She discusses why she wrote it in secret

Yvonne Bailey-Smith: ‘I was terrified of giving Zadie my manuscript’

As she joins the family business, the author tells how her career in healthcare and her own early life informed her debut novel, The Day I Fell Off My Island

David Mitchell: ‘The world still thinks autistic people don’t do emotions’

The writer on how translating The Reason I Jump for his non-verbal autistic son was a lifesaver and his excitement at seeing the new Matrix film he co-wrote

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’

The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithms

Zakiya Dalila Harris: ‘Publishing is such a spoofable world’

The author of a debut novel about diversity in the workplace on how black people act around white people, embracing her hair, and what’s changed a year after George Floyd’s murder

Stephen Mangan: ‘Whenever I considered writing, I thought: “What right do you have?”’

The Green Wing and Episodes star talks about making the leap from acting to writing a children’s book about bereavement, and grieving for Helen McCrory and Paul Ritter