Chris Hammer: ‘The suburbs can be delightfully sinister. The blandness is a great setting for crime books’

The novelist reflects on his trip along the drought-stricken Murray-Darling that prompted the leap into writing and how the Australian bush inspires his bestselling crime fiction

‘The risk was worth it’: All Fours author Miranda July on sex, power and giving women permission to blow up their lives

The artist and author’s hit book had so much in common with her own life that even her friends forgot it wasn’t real. How did this revolutionary portrayal of midlife desire come to inspire a generation of women?

‘They entrusted me with their daughter’s memory’: Women’s prize winner Rachel Clarke on her story of a life-saving transplant

The Story of a Heart, which won this year’s award for nonfiction, tells how one child saved the life of another. The author talks about the amazing families involved, campaigning for a better NHS, and how being a doctor frames the way she writes

Women’s prize winner Yael van der Wouden: ‘It’s heartbreaking to see so much hatred towards queer people’

The winner of this year’s fiction prize on growing up as an outsider, why we’re all guilty of complicity, and using her acceptance speech to reveal that she is intersex

‘No smartphones before 14; no social media until 16’: The Anxious Generation author on how to fight back against big tech

One year on, Jonathan Haidt talks about the way his book changed the global conversation around children and digital devices – and explains how he handles his own teenagers

‘Publishing is a dream, but this has also been one of the hardest years of my life’: Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher

The novelist has been awarded the Dylan Thomas prize for young writers. She talks about giving up medical training to pursue fiction – and the childhood memories that inspired her winning debut, The Coin

Walk on the wild side: Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs on their epic hiking movie The Salt Path

Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir about her and her husband’s 630-mile trek around England’s south coast has become a film. Its stars, makers and Winn talk floods, fog and forgiveness

My sister was found dead. Then I discovered her search history – and the online world that had gripped her

Adele Zeynep Walton’s sibling Aimee was a talented artist who loved music. It was only after her death that Walton realised Aimee had been lured into a dangerous community – and that others may also be victims of it

American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn’t need to justify my right to write that book’

Five years after being vilified for exploiting the migrant experience in her bestseller, the author reveals how the backlash inspired her latest novel

‘My legal work sows the seeds of my stories’: International Booker prize winner Banu Mushtaq

The author and activist, who was subject to a fatwa in 2000, has won the prestigious prize for translated fiction with her translator Deepa Bhasthi for her collection of short stories about the lives of Muslim women. They explain why Heart Lamp’s themes ‘are universal’

‘I read him my seven-page sex scene’: Gay Bar author Jeremy Atherton Lin’s transatlantic love story

When the writer’s partner overstayed his US visa, the couple were forced to live ‘underground’. He talks about their fear of deportation – and the secret to a happy open relationship

‘We shouldn’t blow this one’: why Democrats have a chance to retake the working class

Joan C Williams explains how to win over voters – and shares a quiz that tells you whether you’re elite or not

‘I dropped a C-bomb into Tolstoy’: one man’s quest to translate War and Peace into ‘bogan Australian’

Melbourne man Ander Louis has translated hundreds of pages of the 19th century classic line by line to include Ford Falcons, wankers and drongos

Robert Macfarlane: ‘Sometimes I felt as if the river was writing me’

The writer and poet on reimagining rivers as living beings, the ecological crisis near and far and why copyright laws should protect nature

‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons

As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance, and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedy