James McConnachie looks back on the gender bifurcation of childhood reading - and reminds us not to underestimate the gender-transcending power of the empathetic imagination.

Mark McCrum leads us into the strange world of the ghost writer, whose perilous path encounters both too little and too much material, and where the famous subjects of ghost-written autobiographies can co-operate or not.

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Caitlin Davies and her father Hunter Davies let us eavesdrop on a conversation about their respective writing careers, being compulsive writers in a family of writers and generational changes in the publishing industry.

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Rukhsana Ahmad speaks with John Siddique about her peripatetic childhood in Pakistan, how her concern for other people motivates her to keep writing across years and genres, and how she’s avoided the constraints of the ‘post-colonial’.

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Leigh Russell speaks with Robin Blake about becoming a crime writer in her fifties, writing series books that can also stand alone, what readers want from her genre and her surprising crime-writing hero.

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Donny O’Rourke visits old haunts in Dumfries and the Borders, ghosted by the bards of Scotland’s past, for the liminal Celtic festival of Samhain.

Julian Turner considers the usefulness of imagination, not just to the writer, but also to the exile and the abused child, and suggests that metaphorical thinking may be psychologically essential.

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Susan Barker speaks with Cherise Saywell about the international origins of her novels, the way her characters and storylines emerge organically as she writes and her experiences living in Japan and China.

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Rick Stroud speaks with Robin Blake about how his film-making background influences his literary projects, his fascination with WW2 and the projects it has led him to, and his love of simple, clear writing.

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Dipo Agboluaje explains how migrating from London to his family’s homeland of Nigeria as a young boy shaped his interest in playwriting, with inspiration along the way from diverse mythologies.

Penny Hancock wonders when it's legitimate, if your professional occupation leaves you free to manage your own time and involves an activity other people do simply for pleasure, to say that writing is your career?

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Meaghan Delahunt speaks with Cherise Saywell about revolutionary beginnings, the physical nature of her writing and drafting process, being a 'citizen of nowhere' and the pressure on Australian writers to conform to Colonial perceptions of their country.

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Mimi Khalvati speaks with John Greening about losing her Persian origins in an Isle of Wight boarding school, the creative benefits of constrained poetic forms, the neglected role of abstraction in English poetry and why she co-founded the Poetry School.

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