Susan Hill: ‘I was never good at anything else’

At 68, veteran novelist Susan Hill shows no signs of slowing down. She tells Robert McCrum why storytelling wasn't just a passion – it was her only chance of employment

The mystery of Stella Rimington, the Booker prize and the Observer dance critic

The choice of the former head of MI5 to chair the Man Booker prize raises the question: how does the Observer dance critic Luke Jennings fit in to all this?

Booker club: The Remains of the Day

Sam Jordison: Poignant, subtly plotted and with the perfect unreliable narrator, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about a repressed servant deserved to rise above the clamour surrounding the shortlist in the year of his Booker triumph

Ang Lee casts unknown teenage actor in Life of Pi

Suraj Sharma, a 17-year-old student from Delhi, wins lead role in film adaptation of Yann Martel's novel

Win the Booker and live like never before

The Booker prize and longevity go hand in hand, and I have the facts to prove it, says Robert McCrum

Once upon a life: Jill Paton Walsh

Driving in Mallorca in February 1992, wondering if snow ever appeared on the mountains, Jill Paton Walsh suddenly realised how to write the book she'd been thinking of for 10 years. But then she had to publish it …

The Booker prize is just another flea circus for writers

Hanif Kureishi and PG Wodehouse have both compared writers to performing fleas. And with good reason, says Robert McCrum

Booker prize disdains comedy? What a joke

Sam Jordison: To suggest that Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question is the first comic novel to win this award is, as he himself says, nonsense

Booker prize 2010: Notes from the ceremony

At last night's prizegiving, the air was humming with contradictory rumours, but the result drew unanimous acclaim

Booker prize 2010 smiles on comic novels

Howard Jacobson's win is also a long overdue boost for the status of comic fiction

Booker prize 2010: is Howard Jacobson a worthy winner?

Howard Jacobson has triumphed at the 2010 Man Booker prize with The Finkler Question, in a year in which the field remained wide open right up to the final moment. What do you make of the decision?