Jane Monckton Smith: ‘Domestic abuse isn’t a row. It’s when one person has become a threat to another’

The author and professor of public protection on the red flags of coercive control and how courts should change to give abuse victims an equal voice

Eliot Higgins: ‘People accuse me of working for the CIA’

The founder of the online investigative collective Bellingcat talks about working with Alexei Navalny, open source reporting and the trouble with ‘cyber-miserablism’

Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more’

The Nobel-winning author talks about scaring Harold Pinter, life after death – and his new novel about an ‘artificial friend’

‘We wanted people to see that we exist’: the photographer who recorded lesbian life in the 70s

She toured America photographing women like herself, at time when being out could cost you your job, home and family. As Eye to Eye, a book of her groundbreaking work is republished, Joan E Biren, known as JEB, recalls why the images were so vitally important

Remembering Jeremy Heywood, the civil servant who ran Britain

In Suzanne Heywood’s memoir, What Does Jeremy Think?, she reveals the inner workings of Whitehall – and its ‘greatest servant’, her husband

Val McDermid: ‘To survive, you had to be twice as good as the guys’

The Scottish crime writer on working in a newsroom in the 70s, coping with lockdown and the transformation of attitudes to gay couples in her home nation

Isabel Allende: ‘Everyone called me crazy for divorcing in my 70s. I’ve never been scared of being alone’

The bestselling Chilean American novelist talks about her foundation for women, laughing too much to write romance - and what she’s learned from her grandchildren

‘Love’s labours should be lost’: Maria Stepanova, Russia’s next great writer

The Muscovite’s work is arriving in English this year in three books of remarkable memoir, poems and essays that, she explains, reach for ‘the truth of the past’

Nadia Owusu: ‘I wrote as a way to process trauma’

The New York-based writer talks about her peripatetic childhood, the pain of losing her parents – and finding love at a jazz jam session

Francis Spufford: ‘I’m still angry about what has been done to this country’

The Golden Hill author talks about the family tragedy that fed his love of reading, being a middle-class socialist and why he’s trying to ‘scuff off’ the period glow of historical fiction

‘I document America’s strange beauty’: the photography of My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee

He played a redemption-seeking redneck on TV, but lately the actor has found solace off-screen, travelling with his camera. He talks about slackers, the Mallrats sequel and breezing into one-horse towns

Ethan Hawke: ‘It’s just a petrifying time to speak about male sexuality’

The Oscar-nominated actor on his new novel set during a production of Henry IV, dealing with bad reviews and art’s role in examining all human behaviour

‘I was pretty crushed’: Mitch Benn wrote two novels – then stopped. What happened?

The standup won a book deal after an idle tweet. Two books later, his love for publishing was over. He talks about why he’s persisting with the third book in his scifi trilogy

‘I’m flabbergasted’: Monique Roffey on women, whiteness and winning the Costa

The Mermaid of Black Conch’s author explains why she expected ‘a quiet life’ for the formally daring, magical realist novel that has been declared book of the year

The Capote Tapes: inside the scandal ignited by Truman’s explosive final novel

He partied with high society America but caused outrage when he spilled their secrets. Ebs Burnough talks us through his new film about Answered Prayers – the ‘smart, salacious’ novel Capote never finished