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.

Kapka Kassabova & Peter Stamm

In this special Edinburgh Book Festival edition of the Granta Podcast Laura Barber talks to Kapka Kassabova (Street Without a Name, Twelve Minutes of Love) and Peter Stamm (Seven Years) about the often paradoxical relationship between writing and place.

Henry Marsh

Dina Nayeri

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

Claire Vaye Watkins & Ted Hodgkinson

‘These are stories that capture sudden, unexpected intimacies and unearth alternate family mythologies in seemingly innocuous objects.’

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?’

Peter Stamm & Ted Hodgkinson

Peter Stamm on imagining his characters as buildings, why he wants to have a room full of ugly objects and whether he believes that people can change.

Jo Shapcott & George Szirtes

Jo Shapcott reads her poem ‘Callisto’s Song’ and talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about what drew her to render Callisto’s tragic transformation, and George Szirtes explains why he was compelled by Actaeon’s wayward gaze.

Nathan Englander & Ted Hodgkinson

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