Playing with fire

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

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

Queer as folk tales

HE has more than three dozen books to his name, with sales in more than 80 countries approaching 200 million. They’ve been read in over 80 languages, making Ken Follett one of the world’s best-loved a

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