Mo Yan & John Freeman

‘My life is more current, more contemporary and the cutting throat cruelty of our contemporary times limits the romance that I once felt.’

Victor LaValle & John Freeman

‘Our battle is between those trapped inside the institutions of modern American life (our economic and political systems in particular) and those who manipulate such institutions for their own profit.’

Han Dong & Philip Hand

‘Inflaming readers isn’t a good thing; I want to entice them.’

Salman Rushdie & John Freeman

‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’

Nicola Barker & Yuka Igarashi

‘I’ve always thought of myself as someone who writes outside of the dominant culture; an outsider looking in.’

Zadie Smith & Ted Hodgkinson

Zadie Smith on writing tighter sentences, the ‘essential hubris’ of criticism and why novelists prefer writing in their pyjamas.

Henry Marsh

Dina Nayeri

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

Florence Boyd & Ted Hodgkinson

‘There is a dichotomy of darkness and beauty within things that we can’t confront head on.’

Anthony Shadid & Ted Hodgkinson

‘It’s very difficult to say what kind of Iraq is going to emerge from this trauma. I think we have to wait a generation.’

Karl Ove Knausgård & Sophia Efthimiatou

‘You are in the middle of your life and you think, how did I get here?’

Nathan Englander & Ted Hodgkinson

‘I don’t want to write any story that I think can be written.’

Ben Lerner & Ted Hodgkinson

‘I have no memory of intending to write a novel.’

Marcelo Ferroni

‘This is an exciting moment for Brazilian literature. We may see a batch of new, vibrant novels, really soon.’