Writing Slade House, the author explains, grew out of a Twitter experiment that drew him on to an immersion in ‘ectoplasmic diversity’

The author explains how she turned two stories, a wife’s and a husband’s, into the single book that became President Obama’s favourite of 2015

The author of Coolie Woman explains how research into the life of her own great-grandmother exposed a hidden history of exploitation

The author of Nightwalking explains how his walks through London in the small hours revealed ‘the distinctive ecology’ of the metropolis at night

The author of The House at the Edge of the World explains how her Baileys prize longlisted story grew from teenage years in Devon, resisting cultural isolation

The writer explains how what is now a bestselling book began as a series of letters she and her partner wrote to a relative stranger but didn’t plan to send

The author of the Wolfhound Century trilogy describes the challenges of combining two different – and competing – genres in the same story

The philosopher explains how his new book was inspired by the widespread acceptance of false ideas from ‘airy advocates and numskulled naysayers’

The author explains why creating a fictional diary for this 17th-century man of letters made more sense than writing a conventional biography

The 2015 Costa first book winner shares the language of pikes, haggs and landmarks in England’s north that inspired his novel

The author of Chasing the Scream on his anxiety about writing a book, and the 30,000-mile journey of recognition and shared stories it took him on, from the drug war ‘ground zero’ in Baltimore to Colombia and Mexico

The author explains how a theatre director helped him take What I Learned from Johnny Bevan – an epic poem about a middle-class journalist who falls under the spell of a working-class poet – all the way to Edinburgh

The Serbian-born novelist explains how she started her Great Gatsby-inspired novel, Gorsky, about Russian oligarchs in London

Twenty-five years after Okri’s Man Booker-winning novel was first published, the Nigerian author reflects on what motivated the magic

The debut novelist describes the imaginative journey that writing Mrs Engels took him on, to reach two women who barely register in history

John Hooper explains how he tried to depict a complicated society where what you see is rarely what you get

It’s choosing the right one, the debut novelist writes, and working out how to make it live on the page

The GP and author explains how he conceived of a journey around the human body in the holistic spirit of medieval medicine

The novelist explains how, despite 20 years’ experience, stepping in to the world she has loved since childhood presented an unnerving but exhilarating challenge