Glyn Maxwell

Julie Hesmondhalgh was born in Accrington in Lancashire and currently lives within a short drive of Simon Armitage's shed over the hills. She has won many awards for her acting performances and is well-known for having played Hayley Cropper in Coronation Street for years - until ...  Show more

Olive Senior gets the prize as the guest who has travelled the furthest to join Simon Armitage in his writing shed in West Yorkshire. Born in rural Jamaica in Cockpit County, Olive currently lives in Toronto, Canada. At 19 she joined the staff of the Jamaican Gleaner, the main ne ...  Show more

We hear what it's like to grow up as the only person of colour in an English village from author and ultra marathon runner Sabrina Pace-Humphreys. 

As an injured soldier under house arrest, Xavier de Maistre staved off boredom by imagining every step around his drawing room was a step across a country; Virginia Woolf’s writerly wandering around central London to buy a pencil exposed the city's transformation in darkness. Ins ...  Show more

This week, AE Stallings, the new Oxford professor of poetry, on the lives of poets; and Ann Kennedy Smith considers the different faces of Cornwall.'Sleeping on islands: A life in poetry', by Andrew Motion'The American poet laureate: A history of US poetry and the state', by Amy ...  Show more

Bestselling author Sebastian Faulks tells Nihal Arthanayake how he creates characters, harnesses history to build stories and how he came up with ideas for his new novel ‘Paris Echo’. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Sebastian’s novel ‘Birdsong’ which has sold millions ...