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

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

A reactionary radical’s case against progress

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

How will future generations look back on us? This is the question novelist Ian McEwan explores in his new novel What We Can Know. Partly set in an imagined future, a combination of climate change and

It’s the cosy season of sitting down with a good book. Here, authors heading for Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival this month share their writing styles