4.9 stars from people who actually write

I have done a great many interviews and most of them are about the news. This one was about the work. Nora had read the book twice, including the parts I thought nobody noticed, and she asked me about a discarded narrator rather than a headline. I left the studio wanting to write, which is not how publicity usually leaves you.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Novelist, Half of a Yellow Sun

A rare thing: an interviewer content to let a sentence finish. We talked about restraint, and about the years of failing slowly that came before the four fast weeks. Nothing was hurried and nothing was simplified. I would happily sit down with this programme again.

Kazuo Ishiguro — Novelist, The Remains of the Day

Six decades of being asked the same four questions, and here I was asked something new — about longhand, and about what people do when the systems fail them. Sharp, funny, properly prepared. Writers should listen to this one with a notebook open.

Margaret Atwood — Novelist & poet, The Blind Assassin

Most shows want the moral of the book. This one wanted the mechanics: structure, revision, the jokes that survive a heavy subject. That's the conversation writers actually need to hear, and it is very hard to find anywhere else.

Colson Whitehead — Novelist, The Underground Railroad

We spoke about fragments — how a novel can be a constellation rather than a straight road — and I was not asked to defend that as a gimmick. Being taken seriously in translation is not something I take for granted. A generous, curious hour.

Olga Tokarczuk — Novelist, Flights

Eight books before anybody was looking, and this is the first interview that treated those years as the story rather than the footnote. We talked craft, fusion fiction, and the long haul. If you are early in your career and discouraged, listen to this episode.

Bernardine Evaristo — Novelist, Girl, Woman, Other

The questions were quiet and precise, which is the only way to talk about sentences. I was allowed to think in the middle of an answer. That silence is a kind of respect, and it made the conversation truer than most.

Ocean Vuong — Poet & novelist, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Thirty years of research and rewriting is not a glamorous subject, but here it was the subject. Nora asked about the drafts I abandoned and the reporting I did in Tokyo. Working writers will get more out of one hour of this than a shelf of craft books.

Min Jin Lee — Novelist, Pachinko