Milan Kundera & Ian McEwan

‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.

Katha Pollitt & Adam Gopnik

‘I write for people who like poetry. The people who don’t like poetry are on their own.’

Rose Tremain & Ollie Brock

‘I think, on a desert island, what I’d really appreciate are long books: books as day-by-day companions, to combat loneliness and fear.’

S.J. Naudé & Ivan Vladislavić

‘In rapidly transforming societies, writers may lose the space they’ve built their imaginative lives around.’

Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey interviewed author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at New Beacon Books about his childhood in rural Kenya and his piece in the new Granta - an extract of upcoming memoir Dreams in a Time of War.

Jaime Karnes & Ollie Brock

‘I began telling stories as a child – a way to guarantee invitation to sleepover parties.’

Nick Papadimitriou & Ted Hodgkinson

‘I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw.’

Tim Adams & Richard Ford

‘It may be that writing fiction, imagining agencies, is my most trusted way into the unseen.’

Erin McMillan & Roy Robins

‘The other important component of the why of writing is that I’ve always been a bit of a liar.’

David Guterson & John Freeman

‘Hubris, power, sex, ambition, frailty, pathos, descent, castigation: there but for the grace of gods go I, and as long as it isn’t me, great!’

Nicola Barker & Yuka Igarashi

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

John Freeman & Roy Robins

‘I think you know right away if a piece of writing is good. Does it move me? Does it have intensity? Is it beautiful?’

Carlos Yushimito & Santiago Roncagliolo

‘We shouldn’t just study people through their archives, but also by being witness to their dreams.’

Al Alvarez & Ted Hodgkinson

‘I think anything is good for you that makes you laugh.’