Sharon Millar

‘Writing allows me to go below the surface and pull up the things that can’t be articulated in any other form.’

Etgar Keret

‘At first, I thought the best way to introduce Gadi Taub’s powerful novel would be through its sophisticated and twist-filled plot. But the hard hitting story isn’t half as complex and unique as its protagonists.’

Lillian Li

‘I don’t think I ever learned how to tell a story in the literal sense.’

Valeria Luiselli

‘Perhaps it is the way he’s able to delicately tap into the most disturbing layers of reality and turn our conception of what is normal inside out. Perhaps it’s because he’s always telling a deeper, sadder, more disquieting story while pretending to narrate another.’

D.T. Max

D.T. Max on about why ‘David always wanted to be one David’, the solace he found in twelve-step programmes and what his use of wiper-fluid, on a car ride with Jonathan Franzen, reveals about his prose style.

Henry Marsh

Dina Nayeri

‘I could shape a story before my mouth could shape the words.’

Emma Martin

‘I’ve occasionally caught a kind of self-consciousness stalking me when I write about New Zealand.’

Diana McCaulay

‘I want my writing to be grounded in the real and complex place, without nostalgia or idealization.’

Andrea Mullaney

‘To move past the ugly parts of history, you have to acknowledge them, on all sides, and this is what I think historical fiction can do so well: show how we got from there to here.’

Daniyal Mueenuddin

‘Great translations are much rarer than great works of fiction or poetry.’

Elizabeth McCracken

‘This week John Freeman spoke to Best Young American Novelist Elizabeth McCracken about her works-in-progress, a novel that broke up into six short stories, and her contribution to Granta’s latest issue.’

Bill Morgan

‘We’ve fallen out of the habit of writing out our lives for one another, and instead we just pick up the phone.’

Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle reads ‘Long Distance,’ an essay about the ‘most loving relationship’ of his early twenties – conducted solely by telephone – and on having sex in a new body, after losing 155 pounds.