Zadie Smith on her new novel Swing Time – an extraordinary conversation with Sarah Kanowski. Also, Australian Indian writer Roanna Gonsalves puts women’s bodies at the centre of her sharp and funny stories of migration, love and creativity in The Permanent Resident; Man Booker shortlisted writer Ottessa Moshfegh talks about writing; while Chinese law professor and crime writer He Jiahong explains how fiction can confront both corruption and the Cultural Revolution as a ‘black hole’ at his country’s heart.

The history of the novel, traveling between Scotland, China and onto to Australia, a special event from the recent Creative Conversation event in Perth for the China Australia Writing Centre

Historian Ann McGrath won the NSW Premier’s History Prize for her book Illicit Love, on interracial sex and marriage,and she speaks about how important these stories of ‘romance’ regulated and controlled are for understanding contact across cultures and time. Also, the latest collections of best Australian short stories and poetry, with Charlotte Wood and poet Sarah Holland Batt; and what it means to think about ‘classics’ of Australian writing with publisher Michael Hayward and poet John Kinsella

Hannah Kent's new novel The Good People, which is set in 19th century rural Ireland; Today Will be Different by Maria Semple introduces us to Eleanor Flood who keeps hoping she can start afresh and get stuffing, or perhaps drawing with Melissa Ashley and The Birdman's Wife

Tom Keneally’s new novel, Crimes of the Father explores the 1960s and 1990s; Kate Mildenhall’s debut novel of lighthouses and friendship, Skylarking; and African Book Club, Cry the Beloved Country

How a barefoot visit to an art gallery made Tim Winton a writer; love and hunger on the American frontier, with Sebastian Barry’s new novel, Days Without End; the medusa tale retold in Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk; and murder among the crofters with Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am; Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love, a fictional take on Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present performance piece; the state of YA Queer fiction with David Levithan; and a novel that speculates on the 11 days in 1926 in which Agatha Christie disappeared, Kristel Thornell’s On the Blue Train.

How well do you know Shakespeare’s the Tempest? Miranda, Prospero, Caliban . . . an island? It’s been told and retold many times, its meaning remade according to its listeners. For Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, that meant turning it into a story set in a prison. She’s a bit obsessed with prisons in her writing, she reckons...and here's another one.

If you know the story of Harry Potter, Boy Wizard, you’ll know he spent years living under the stairs, lonely and unloved. Do you wonder why he didn’t read more? Writer Lev Grossman did, & he argues Harry should have read more nerdy fantasy, and it would have helped him enormously. And so in his cult series The Magicians, Grossmans characters are big readers. They know their Narnia.

Today a novel written from the perspective of a foetus in Ian McEwen's latest, Nutshell. Also, Eimear Mcbride, talking about sex and theatre, and Mary Gaitskill’s novel, The Mare. There’s a horse in it, but it’s not really a horsey book.