“When I start I like to know in advance where the story is going, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the story before I begin writing it.” (Paris Review) Michael Frayn writes: spy thril...
Here are some facts about Philip Hensher: He was among Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. His 2008 novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the...
In doing this research on Martin Amis, I learned that he normally spends two hours a day on his writing, five days a week. Except when he is in intensive editorial mode where he could spend 6 h...
I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all Byron’s reputation as a womanizer is well-known. He was a free-spirited man whose pe...
Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was an American novelist and children’s writer. What makes Russell Hoban’s writing so memorable, and creates passionate devotees of those lucky enough to discover h...
Ian Rankin is a crime writer. I am mostly interested in what the crime tells us about ourselves and the society we live in. So it’s not a game I’m playing with the reader; I’m approaching t...
There is much to say about V.S. Naipaul. Some grand. Some not so grand. His reaction towards women writers strongly provoked me. It made me think long and hard on whether I wanted to give space t...
“Beryl Bainbridge has writers’ block. (You’d think, wouldn’t you, that after 17 novels she’d have got the hang of it?) The problem, it seems, has been the title. It has taken her two ye...
One of the wonderful things about doing research for this Writers’ Desks series is that I always stumble about something new and interesting. I found this delightful interview in Believer M...
In his book Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography Michael Holroyd refers to three categories of biographers: the biographer who writes about the very famous – film stars, mur...