Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity and About a Boy , and his latest, Just Like You , along with several works of non-fiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch . He has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn , Wild and, most recently, State of the Union . We had a great chat with Nick hearing about how he broke into writing and pitched Fever Pitch to an agent. We also learn about the differen...
Feb 12, 2021•1 hr 11 min
Multi-award winning Mari Hannah is the author of the Kate Daniels series of police procedurals, the Ryan and O'Neil crime series and the Stone and Oliver series. Her latest book in the Kate Daniels series, Without a Trace , is out now and won Capital Crime Book of the Year in 2020. We had a great chat with Mari, hearing about how she moved into writing and her path to publishing - a tale which includes her first novel being dropped at the last moment by a small local publisher. That turned out t...
Feb 05, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 8
Cherie Jones' debut novel ‘ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House ‘ has been receiving rave reviews from the likes of Bernardine Evaristo, who called it "A hard-hitting and unflinching novel from a bold new writer". Her short stories have variously been published in PANK , Cadenza , Eclectica, The Feminist Wire and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She’s a fellowship awardee of the Vermont Studio Centre and completed her MA with distinction at Sheffield Hallam University, where she was awarded the A...
Jan 29, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 7
Allie Reynolds is a former professional snowboarder turned author whose debut thriller, Shiver, is out now. We chat to Allie about her long route to publishing, hearing how she found her agent, and learn about what it felt like when Shiver became the subject of a ten publisher auction. We also hear about the importance of revising your work for submission, as well as how she is coping with that difficult second novel syndrome... Links: Buy Shiver now Visit Allie's website Visit Jericho Writers V...
Jan 22, 2021•57 min•Season 6Ep. 6
Helen Lederer began her career in stand-up comedy at London’s famous Comedy Store, as part of the early 80s comedians including French & Saunders, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson and Harry Enfield and became famous for portraying Catriona in all six series of Absolutely Fabulous. She has also developed a prolific writing career, writing for radio, TV and more recently books, including Losing It, which was nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comedy writing. She is also the found...
Jan 15, 2021•54 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Sharon Bolton is the bestselling author of mystery crime novels such as Sacrifice, Blood Harvest and the highly successful Lacey Flint series. Her most recent book, The Split, is a tense twisty thriller which was chosen for Richard and Judy's Book Club at the end of 2020. We had a great chat with Sharon, hearing about how she almost became a Mills and Boon writer before swerving to mystery thrillers. She tells us why she published her first books under the name SJ Bolton, why that changed and we...
Jan 08, 2021•58 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Back in the summer of 2020, we recorded this episode of the Page One Sessions with Laura Lam and Adrian J Walker. We discussed all manner of things, including whether living through a real-life pandemic would alter the way they tell their future-set stories, how they had been writing during the COVID-19 lockdown, heard about their latest projects, got reading recommendations and much more! This episode is also available as a video podcast on our YouTube site: https://youtu.be/F1kPGk37DJA Be sure...
Jan 01, 2021•57 min
Earlier this year, we chatted with friends of the podcast Sarah Pinborough and Tim Lebbon about how they have been writing during the COVID-19 lockdown, heard about their latest projects, got reading recommendations and much more! This episode is also available as a video podcast on our YouTube site: https://youtu.be/gmE6iCDYn-s . Be sure to tune in to The Page One Podcast every week for in depth discussions with writers about their writing process and how they got into the industry. Links: Buy ...
Dec 25, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Jennie Fields received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the novels Lily Beach , Crossing Brooklyn Ferry , The Middle Ages, and The Age of Desire . A Chicago native, Jennie was inspired by her own mother’s work as a University of Chicago-trained biochemist in the 1950s for her latest novel, Atomic Love . We had a great chat with Jennie about juggling a day job with being a writer (she was previously a highly successful creative director at various New York ad agencies) ...
Dec 18, 2020•55 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Matt Ruff is the author of books such as Fool on The Hill , The Mirage , and Lovecraft Country , which has just been turned into a successful TV show on HBO and Sky Atlantic. His latest novel is 88 names, a cyberpunk/romance mashup set in a virtual world. We had a really interesting chat with Matt, hearing about how he was always destined to be a writer, and why doing creative writing at Cornell helped kickstart his career (but not for the reasons you think!) We also chat about the controversies...
Dec 11, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Alex Garland is the critically acclaimed writer and director of movies such as Ex Machina, Annihilation and, most recently, the TV series Devs. His career began with the bestselling novel, The Beach, before he moved on to writing screenplays for films such as 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd. We had a really enjoyable and fascinating chat with Alex about why he ended up returning his advance for more novels to turn to screenplays instead, and why he felt he had to move on to di...
Dec 04, 2020•1 hr 41 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Daniel Abraham is a bestselling science fiction and fantasy author who has written books including the bestselling The Expanse series of books (along with Ty Franck, under the joint name of James SA Corey), which is now a smash hit series on Amazon Prime. He has also written screenplays for The Expanse, written graphic novel adaptations of George R R Martin's Game of Thrones books. We had great fun chatting with Daniel, hearing about how he moved into the writing world, how The Expanse came abou...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Season 5Ep. 10
Joe Abercrombie's debut fantasy novel, The Blade Itself , was a huge hit when it was published in 2006, and was swiftly followed by the other books in what became The First Law Trilogy . Since then, he's never really stopped writing, with a series of acclaimed standalone and young adult novels. Most recently, he has returned the the world of the First Law with the first two books of the Age of Madness trilogy, A Little Hatred and The Trouble with Peace. The final book in the trilogy, The Wisdom ...
Oct 30, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 5Ep. 9
Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Las Vegas. Her first novel, The Book of M , won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction, and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today Show and NPR On Po...
Oct 23, 2020•59 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House US. He has overseen books by writers including Michael Chabon, Edmund Morris, Suzan-Lori Parks, Michael Pollan, Peter Straub, and Calvin Trillin. He has copyedited books by authors including EL Doctorow, David Ebershoff, Frank Rich and Elizabeth Strout. He has also recently written Dreyer's English , a brilliant and highly amusing grammar and style guide. He has also created the related card game Stet! in...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Cathy Bramley is the Sunday Times Top Ten best-selling author of THE LEMON TREE CAFE. Her other romantic comedies include Ivy Lane, Appleby Farm, Wickham Hall, Conditional Love, The Plumberry School of Comfort Food and White Lies and Wishes. Cathy turned to writing after spending eighteen years running her own marketing agency. Her latest book is My Kind of Happy. We had a great chat with Cathy, hearing about why she decided to start writing books, and how she planned (and made a huge success of...
Oct 09, 2020•56 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Owen Nicholls is a screenwriter with a Masters in Scriptwriting from the University of East Anglia. His first screenplay -- a biopic of the filmmakers Powell and Pressburger -- was optioned to Bedlam Productions, the BAFTA and Academy Award-winning producers of The King's Speech . His work has appeared in Empire and NME, and in 2018 he was selected for the Escalator Scheme run by the National Centre For Writing. Love, Unscripted is his first novel. We had a great time talking with Owen about the...
Oct 02, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Dirk Maggs is the genius behind the audio adaptations of stories such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy , The X Files , the William Gibson Alien 3 adaptation - and of course, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , which has been a huge (and well deserved) hit on Audible. We talk to Dirk to find out how he forged this career, and learn that he in effect created the idea of these “audio movies” (as he calls them) from scratch. From starting out at the BBC to working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker...
Sep 25, 2020•1 hr 45 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Ian Dunt is a political commentator and journalist. He is editor of politics.co.uk, an energetic presence on Twitter, and appears as a pundit on BBC TV, Sky News and Al-Jazeera. He is also the author of two books - Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? and the just released How To Be A Liberal, which is an important, interesting and entertaining guide to the principles and practices of liberalism and shows why it remains our most powerful weapon to shatter the shiny lies of populists. We had great ...
Sep 18, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of novels such as Zoo City, Broken Monsters, and, of course, the international bestseller, The Shining Girls. Her latest novel, Afterland, is a noir road-trip set in a post-pandemic America where 99.9% of the men have all been wiped out. We had a lot of fun chatting to Lauren about her writing career, hearing about how she managed to get her first publishing deal, and also how The Shining Girls catapulted her to international fame. We also talked about h...
Sep 11, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Alastair Campbell is best known for his role as Tony Blair’s chief spokesman and strategist. He has written several bestselling non-fiction and fiction books, including The Blair Years and Winners . A former 'Mind Champion of the Year', he is an ambassador for several mental health charities. His latest book, Living Better, is his honest, moving and life affirming account of his lifelong struggle with depression. We had a fascinating and fun chat with Alastair about how he moved from journalism ...
Sep 04, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of twenty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. He’s also made Bloody Disgusting’s Top Ten Horror Novels, and his latest boo...
Aug 07, 2020•56 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland, and the short story collection, Growing Things and Other Stories. His latest novel, Survivor Song, is a terrifying thriller about an outbreak of a disease (so rather timely!) We chatted with Paul about how he came late to a love of reading ...
Jul 31, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 10
David Quantick is the Emmy-award winning writer of Veep , The Thick of It , TV Burp and much more. He has worked with comedy legends such as Harry Hill and Chris Morris, and is currently continuing his longstanding contribution with Armando Iannucci on his latest series, Avenue 5 . He is also a journalist, having worked many years for the NME, and more recently began to write novels, the most recent of which is Night Train , a horror mystery set on a train in a post-apocalyptic world. On top of ...
Jul 24, 2020•59 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Joe Cornish is the writer and director of films such as Attack the Block and The Kid Who Would be King . He began his career working with his comedy partner Adam Buxton on the brilliant The Adam and Joe Show on Channel 4, before co-writing first Ant-man and then The Adventures of Tintin with Edgar Wright. Recently, he, Edgar, Nira Park and Rachael Prior have formed Complete Fiction Production to continue to bring their ideas to life. We had a great fun chat with Joe about his career, how he writ...
Jul 17, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Adam Christopher’s debut novel Empire State was SciFiNow ’s Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year. The author of Made To Kill , Standard Hollywood Depravity and Killing Is My Business , Adam’s other novels include Seven Wonders , The Age Atomic and The Burning Dark . A contributor to the New York Times bestselling Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View 40th anniversary anthology, Adam has also written the official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary , and ...
Jul 10, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Tendai Huchu is a Zimbabwean author who now lives in Edinburgh, and whose first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare , was a huge hit, being nominated for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. He followed that up with The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Magician , and is soon to release the first book in The Library of the Dead series, about a young girl who delivers messages for ghosts in a post-apocalyptic Edinburgh. We have great fun talking with Tendai and hearing how he The Hairdresser of Harare...
Jul 03, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Sheila O'Flanagan is an international bestselling author of books such as The Hideaway, What Happened That Night and Suddenly Single. All of her books center around strong female protagonists who find themselves in difficult situations that mean they have to find their inner strength. Her latest book, The Women Who Ran Away, is out in July. We had a great chat with Sheila, hearing about how she swapped a life working in finance for that of a bestselling author, and got great insights from her on...
Jun 26, 2020•51 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Chris Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of his award-winning debut Quite Ugly One Morning , which established him as one of Britain’s leading crime novelists. His 2016 novel Black Widow won both the McIlvanney Prize and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. Writing under the name Ambrose Parry, he has also co-written (along with his wife, Dr Marisa Haetzman) thrilling mystery books set in 19th Century Edinburgh. Chris' novels...
Jun 19, 2020•58 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Thomas Welsh is an award winning urban fantasy and short story author based in Scotland. He was the winner of the Elbow Room fiction prize for And Then I was Floating and has also been published in The 404 Ink F Word Collection , Pseudopod and Leicester Writes . More recently, he has released Anna Undreaming and its sequel, Anna and the Midnight Road , the first two parts of his urban fantasy Metiks Fade Trilogy. A man of many talents, he also writes for video games, and was lead writer on the r...
Jun 12, 2020•1 hr 8 min
