Julia Ebner: ‘There’s an adrenaline rush in undercover work, getting inside a far-right movement’

Julia Ebner spent two years infiltrating far-right networks. The counter-extremism expert discusses fear, loathing and democracy in an age of disinformation

Christopher Eccleston: ‘I really felt that I was going to die’

After depression, the collapse of his marriage and decades of anorexia, the actor spent his 52nd birthday on a psychiatric ward. He talks about how he found his way back

John Sweeney: ‘You can’t be as neurotic as the BBC and cope with someone like me’

The investigative journalist famed for high-volume encounters with ‘baddies’ of all shades was let go by the corporation. But he’s turned it into material for a novel

Candice Carty-Williams: ‘When I was growing up, humour was a deflection’

TThe award-winning author of Queenie talks about racism in dating, the childhood books that formed her and the importance of friends

Petina Gappah: ‘I learned Swahili to write this’

The Zimbabwean novelist on her new book about explorer David Livingstone, her fascination with goodness and servitude, and being grilled by her history‑loving father

Jenny Offill: ‘I no longer felt like it wasn’t my fight’

What happens when we wake up to the climate crisis? The novelist reflects on escaping the apocalypse, division and hope in her latest novel, Weather

‘These stories don’t get told’: a paramedic’s notes from inside the ambulance

‘Jake Jones’ explains what he’s revealed – and what he’s hidden – describing an unseen world of private dramas ranging from the trivial to the tragic

Naomi Ishiguro: ‘Short stories are like songs – I think of an anthology like an album’

The writer talks about her debut short story collection, Escape Routes, why she loves Doctor Who – and the day her dad won the Nobel prize

Marian Keyes: ‘I used to mainline Mills & Boon’

The novelist, 56, tells Eva Wiseman about depression, nihilism, ‘chick lit’, being born an alcoholic and how she dealt with the death of her dad

Susan Choi: ‘A lot of people seem to feel very seen by the book’

Susan Choi wrote her novel Trust Exercise before the #MeToo movement gathered pace, but this US National Book award-winner has joined a vital conversation

Francine Toon: ‘Witches are empowered women’

Her gothic debut novel, Pine, draws on childhood years in the Scottish Highlands and eerie links between patriarchy and the paranormal

Nora Roberts: ‘I could fill all the bookstores in all the land’

Her 220 novels – from crime to romance to suspense – have sold 500m copies around the world. Her secret? Early morning Diet Pepsis and an eight-hour day

Dispatches from hell: the extraordinary story of the hero who infiltrated Auschwitz

This week Jack Fairweather won the Costa Prize for his book The Volunteer. It is the biography of Polish resistance leader and intelligence agent Witold Pilecki, who had himself deliberately interned in the death camp

How Michael Cashman changed the world: from EastEnders’ first gay kiss to Stonewall

His childhood was mired by abuse he could never divulge. But he went on to countless triumphs

Bae Suah: ‘I was practising my typing and wrote my first story by accident’

The Korean author, who has been accused of being ‘un-Korean’, talks about the concept of home and being translated into English for the first time