The folk horror novelist still finds this writing business “excruciating”…

What childhood book sparked your love of reading? One that really stands out for me is Winnie-the-Pooh. I was given a hardback copy on my seventh birthday, and I still treasure it. The maps in the fro

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

Oh, you want to hear about fairy-tale retellings? You want to know the secret of why I write them? Is that it? Fine. Come a little closer. These aren’t some enchanted beans I’m selling, this is the re

We have wandered many months through this land of Building Blocks. It is time for a break. Learning is a weary trek. And writing is not all about learning. Writing is about, well, writing. The doing o

Ian McEwan is strolling through the garden of his Cotswolds manor house. Bees waft drowsily between wildflowers. Plump apples, pears and walnuts bauble the trees. Vibrant cerulean-blue damselflies hov