Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer is a former elementary school teacher whose Artemis Fowl series has become an international bestseller. The new novel in the series is Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian.

From his Q & A with Boyd Tonkin at the Independent.
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire him/her

William Boyd... He expresses the inner working of the human mind so beautifully, it makes me want to quit.

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Richard Ford

Richard Ford's new novel is Canada.

From his Q & A with Tim Adams at the Guardian:
In the book, Canada becomes a sort of promised land, a refuge. There is a line characters cling to: "Canada was better than America and everyone knew that - except Americans." Is that how it feels to you?

I never had much conceptual idea of Canada being better. But whenever I go there, I feel this fierce sense of

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Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels earned a B.A. in history and an M.A. in classical studies at Stanford, and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent; The Origin of Satan; and The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. Her latest book is Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.

From

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Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh's books include The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, and Sea of Poppies.

From his May 2012 Q & A at the Independent:
Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him

My favourite authors change week to week. I've just finished a reading Philip Hensher's 'Scenes from Early Life', about his partner's childhood. It is distantly like Gertrude Stein's book on Alice B

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William Faulkner

In 1956 Jean Stein interviewed William Faulkner for The Paris Review. The start of that interview:
INTERVIEWER
Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don't like interviews.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I

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John Irving

From John Irving's Q & A with Athena McKenzie about his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River:Is it true that a Dylan song was the beginning idea for this novel? How?

No, it’s not true. I had been thinking of a story about a cook and his son for more than 15 years. I knew it began in a northern New England logging camp; I knew it was a fugitive novel, that both father and son were on the

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Stephen King

Wallace Stroby interviewed Stephen King for Writer's Digest magazine in 1991.

Part of the Q & A:

STROBY: C.S. Forester, the British writer, once described his story-developing process as dropping assorted objects into the water of his subconscious and letting them sit there for weeks or months or years. Eventually, he said, he would feel them merge and meld and take some sort of shape until an

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Elizabeth Zelvin

Elizabeth Zelvin is a New York psychotherapist, a three-time Agatha Award nominee, and author of the mystery series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler, starting with Death Will Get You Sober. The third book, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, is now out, and “Death Will Tank Your Fish” was a 2011 Derringer Award nominee for Best Short Story.

From Zelvin's Q & A with The Stiletto Gang:

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Meg Howrey

Meg Howrey was a professional dancer and actress. Her new novel is The Cranes Dance.

From her Q & A with Barbara Chai for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
Did you draw upon your own experience in the ballet world for “The Cranes Dance”?

I drew on some personal experience, of course, although much more so on things and people I observed. The ballet company in the novel is fictional.

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Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl's books include A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, Blue Arabesque, and The Florist’s Daughter, which received the Minnesota Book Award among many other honors.

From her ShootingStar* interview with Maureen Vance:

What writing do you consider to be of quality? What in other people’s writing strikes you, or what sort of writing do you like most to read?

I read in all the genres: I

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Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson is an award-winning poet and the author of several novels, including Fred and Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, and Lucky Bunny.

From her Q & A at the Guardian:
How did you come to write Lucky Bunny?

I've long been interested in writing about the appeal of risk-taking, destructive behaviours such as relationships with dangerous men.

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David Crystal

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the English language. His latest book is The Story of English in 100 Words.

From the author's Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: Among languages, what makes English stand apart? What can it do that most other

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Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon is the author of the international bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Whitbread Book of the Year award; and the New York Times bestseller A Spot of Bother. In addition to The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and The Village Under the Sea, a collection of poetry, Haddon has also written and

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David Eagleman

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action as well as the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. His scientific research has been published in journals from Science to Nature, and his neuroscience books include Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, Why the Net Matters, Live-Wired, and the newly

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Alice Kaplan

Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir, The Collaborator, and The Interpreter, and the translator of OK, Joe. Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale.

Her new book is Dreaming in French:

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Yvvette Edwards

Yvvette Edwards is the author of A Cupboard Full of Coats, her highly acclaimed first novel.

From her Q & A at the Man Booker Prize site:
Was it always your ambition to be a writer?

I have always written. My two equal passions are reading and writing, always have been. I don't think I ever thought that writing for a living was realistic or achievable, but it has always been a dream and a hobby

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Lyndsay Faye

Lyndsay Faye is the author of critically acclaimed Dust and Shadow and the newly released The Gods of Gotham.

From her Q & A with novelist Michael Connelly:
Michael Connelly: I think the first question is about the challenge you gave yourself with this book. Re-creating New York City circa 1845. The question I ask is, Why then? But what I am really asking is why you took the difficult path. Why

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Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

From her Q & A with Susan Bordo:

SB: We all know that any work of imagination has to go beyond the recorded facts. But do you think that there is a point at which historical fiction can go too far? What historical standards do you hold

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Catherine Hakim

Catherine Hakim is a social scientist and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Policy Studies, London. Her publications include over 100 papers published in British, European and American refereed academic journals and edited collections, four textbooks, and over a dozen books and monographs on the labour market, changing patterns of employment and working time, women’s employment

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Veronica Roth

Veronica Roth is the New York Times bestselling author of Divergent and Insurgent, the first two books in a trilogy that she began writing while still a college student.

From her Q & A with the Jacket Copy blog:

Jacket Copy: "The Hunger Games," "Divergent" and dozens of other titles in this burgeoning dystopian genre showcase strong female protagonists. Do you see a new shape of feminism

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Michael Sims

Michael Sims is the editor of The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories.

From his Q & A with Lenny Picker at Publishers Weekly:
How did you come to be such a voracious reader?

I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian,

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Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is the award-winning author of Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, A Choir of Ill Children, and many other titles. He’s won two International Thriller Writers Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His new novel is The Last Kind Words.

From

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Margaret George

Margaret George's historical novels include Mary, Called Magdalene.

From her Q & A about the book at her publisher's website:
The Bible hardly mentions Mary Magdalene. What other primary sources did you turn to for information on this historical figure? How much did you rely on the Gnostic Gospels, specifically the Gospel of Mary?

Scanty though they are, the four canonical gospels remain our

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Roger Smith

Roger Smith's thrillers Dust Devils, Wake Up Dead and Mixed Blood are published in seven languages and two are in development as movies in the U.S. His books have won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award) and been nominated for Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel awards. His novella, Ishmael Toffee, is available and a fourth novel, Capture, will be out in mid-2012.

From his Q &

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Paul Ingrassia

Paul Ingrassia won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 (with Joseph B. White) for reporting on management crises at General Motors. He is the author of Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster and the newly released Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars.

Highlights from his May 2012 NPR interview:

On what the Chevy Corvette represented in

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Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown was a national bestseller and won numerous awards. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “a book that decisively establishes him as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive and irresistible

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Pam Houston

Pam Houston divides her time between her ranch in Colorado and the University of California at Davis, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program. She has been a frequent contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine, and her writing appears regularly in More and other publications. She in the author of the best-selling Cowboys Are My Weakness.

Houston's new novel is Contents May

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Paul French

Paul French's new book is Midnight in Peking.  It is the true-crime tale of the murder of a British diplomat's daughter in Peking just before World War II.

From his Q & A with Randy Dotinga at the Christian Science Monitor:
Q: What was happening in Peking – now Beijing – in early 1937, when the young woman was so viciously murdered?

A: This was absolutely the last gasp of old China. The

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Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006)[1] was an award-winning Scottish novelist. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and A Far Cry From Kensington (1988).

From the transcript of an interview Spark did with the BBC:
I want to talk about the emphasis I think you've always put on experience and the search for

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Melinda Moustakis

Melinda Moustakis is the author of Bear Down, Bear North, a collection of connected short stories set in rural Alaska.

From her interview with the Kenyon Review:KR: What internal or external factors have the biggest influence on your creative process?

MM: I know that I learned to write voice and dialogue from listening to my uncle and his fishing buddies tell fishing stories on the river.

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