The first book interview
We interview debut authors, writers and poets to celebrate their first book.
-
Alexandra Kleeman: ‘Where I grew up, there is a daily sense of your smallness'You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine depicts a young woman’s dissociation from suburban life. Its author explains her focus on a very modern kind of loneliness
-
Rory Gleeson: 'Writing wrecks your head'The author of debut novel Rockadoon Shore talks about wanting to write like Richard Linklater directs, and visions of old English teachers berating him for his efforts
-
Susan Beale: 'Memoir doesn't get you into people's heads unfiltered'Shortlisted for a Costa prize, The Good Guy uses fiction to explore the author’s hidden roots as a child adopted in the 60s
-
Jade Chang: ‘I wanted to write a different type of immigrant story’The Wangs Vs the World was conceived as the US collapsed into recession in 2008, and tells a story of living inside and outside the national dream
-
Saleem Haddad: 'I put everything into this novel and it was a relief'Guapa portrays a gay man struggling with shame amid the wreckage of a failed uprising in an unnamed Arab country. The author explains how this ‘fluent and passionate’ debut is and isn’t his own story
-
Leroy Smith: 'Guns, robberies. That was my life'The first book interview: Out of the Box, written from shocking experience, is the memoir of a reformed criminal with an impassioned message for young black men
-
Eric Beck Rubin: 'Were my characters enemies? Lovers? I didn’t want to answer'An ambiguous male friendship is at the heart of Rubin’s debut novel, The School of Velocity. The author explains why he wants to leave readers wanting to know more
-
Jess Kidd: 'You make a deal with the universe and keep writing'The author of Himself explains some of the insoluble questions in her pitch black Irish murder mystery, and her long journey to publicaton
-
'Eerie and disturbing': Holly Throsby on MH370, true crime and her first novelAustralia has an undeniably gothic obsession with missing people, says singer-songwriter Throsby. Her debut novel, Goodwood taps into that rich vein
-
Greg Jackson: 'Writing a novel is like an interminable family vacation'The author on his debut short-story collection Prodigals, the pressure to write longer, class in America, and leaving things to the imagination
-
Tiffany McDaniel: 'The novel was there saying, "Let me out!"'The author of The Summer That Melted Everything explains how her debut was forged during a fever of writing, when she finished a novel in eight days
-
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: ‘Pain shape-shifts down the generations’When her mother suddenly lost her memory, Buchanan began to write Harmless Like You, her cross-cultural debut novel about how children inherit identity
-
Rebecca Rideal: 'The time of the grand histories is coming to an end'The debut author explains how 1666, her account of an extraordinary year of plague, fire and war, seeks to tell a large story from the ground up
-
Idra Novey: 'I wanted to burn down the house of fiction'The author talks about the disappearances – in life, literature and translation – that inform her writing, and her efforts to write a novel that works like poetry
-
Jack Urwin: 'We don’t need to be the men our grandfathers were'First book interview: The debut author’s study of ‘toxic masculinity’ was uncomfortable to write, but he says it’s fired with hope that clichéd male behaviour can be unlearned
-
Daisy Johnson: seeking 'intense strangeness in a world that feels like ours'The first book interview: Fen’s author explains how short stories were the perfect form to ‘do really weird things and have really weird things happen’
-
Cynthia Bond: 'I get why so many writers are alcoholics!'The author of Ruby talks about how she immersed herself in an agonising history of abuse, echoed in her own life, to write her much acclaimed debut novel
-
Vadim Levental: 'A novel must be more than just the story of some made-up life'Masha Regina’s author explains how he expects his debut novel to annoy readers, but traditional make-believe no longer works in an era saturated with fact
-
Andrew Michael Hurley: 'There is no place more terrifying than your own mind'He has been praised by Stephen King and heaped with awards, but success doesn’t scare the debut author of northern gothic ‘masterpiece’, The Loney
Alice Broadway: 'I guess it's inevitable that I became a bit death-obsessed'