For several years, Evie Wyld combined writing fiction with running an independent bookshop - Review, in Peckham, South London.“It seems like the perfect marriage, doesn’t it?” Evie says of the dual role of writer-bookseller, “but sadly you don’t absorb the books through your skin.”Although something about her routine must have worked because the two novels that Evie wrote between serving customers and managing the store - After the Fire, A Still Small Voice and All the Birds, Singing - led to...

“It’s strange and haunting to be back here after a very, very long time,” says Tessa Hadley of heading inside seminal childhood destination, Redland Library. " I can still remember the feeling of entering the new book, the first page like a threshold, that excitement and thrill… And  at some point thinking ‘I want to make my own stories...’”Those stories that Tessa has gone on to write - thus far, three collections of short stories and six acclaimed novels - continue to garner widespread...

Gyles Brandreth has been entertaining Brits for decades - charming multiple generations on shows such as Just A Minute, The One Show, Celebrity Gogglebox and Countdown. His many books include a series of novels featuring his fellow wit Oscar Wilde and a recent best-selling celebration of good punctuation, spelling and grammar, Have you Eaten Grandma? His latest offering is the anthology Dancing by the Light of the Moon, which celebrates the magic of learning poetry by heart.‘Words have been...

Candice Carty-Williams is a trailblazer.That trail, in many respects, started at Lewisham Library in South London. This big, cornerstone library provided Candice a ‘safe place’ during her childhood. Passing by the library at night, she’d gaze with wonder at the lights illuminating the library's sign. Later, during her teenage years, the place provided her a sanctuary. It became a home-from-home, a seminal venue. Candice describes in moving and compelling terms for Ex Libris how it feels to...

Val McDermid was so young when she first visited her local library in Fife that she couldn’t even say the word, calling it the ‘labrador’ (after her family’s pet).Kirkcaldy Library rapidly became, though, a home-from-home. Soon enough, young Val was working her way methodically around the shelves. She would come up with ingenious, cheeky ways to bypass the librarians and gain access to the forbidden grown-up shelves.This education laid the foundations for the illustrious writing career that...

As a child, Bobby Seagull would be taken to his local library in East Ham, London, every Saturday afternoon. Without fail. He would get lost in the books there for hours on end, cross-legged on the floor.These trips would prove life-changing.In Bobby’s own words during this episode: ‘East Ham Library is the number one reason that I have this career today… it was absolutely pivotal, in terms of making me who I am.’So much so that today he is officially ‘Libraries Champion’ for CILIP (Chartered...

Benjamin Zephaniah speaks truth-to-power like nobody else. A Kung Fu stylist, dub musician, Peaky Blinder, renegade activist, vegan force-of-nature, and  much-loved ‘people’s poet’, Benjamin has lived many lifetimes.He tells Ex Libris in inimitably raw but sonorous manner about how poetry saved his life; of his mother’s Windrush Generation and its Caribbean oral tradition; being dyslexic and finding a path away from prison; slamming the phone down on Nelson Mandela and exchanging notes with...

The library featured in this episode of Ex Libris is truly inspirational and remarkable. It is a shrine, a beacon, a memorial. Sacred ground, no less.Moreover, the conversation that takes place there - with acclaimed novelist Rachel Seiffert - is visceral and compelling.The Wiener Holocaust Library - found in an elegant Russell Square townhouse in Central London - holds one of the world's leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and Nazi era. Formed in 1933, the Library's unique...

Melvyn Bragg is what people in Britain sometimes call a ‘national treasure’.The man is prodigious.Notably for this bookish show, he has written several award-winning novels and works of non-fiction. In this episode, Melvyn discusses with Ben his bold latest novel, Love Without End.Melvyn began his broadcasting career at the BBC in 1961. He has edited and presented The South Bank Show for the last forty years and chairs In Our Time on BBC Radio 4. He goes into the origins of both these...

Bart Van Es won the 2019 Costa Prize for Book of the Year for his masterful memoir The Cut Out Girl.Announcing the judges’ decision, the Costa chair, the BBC presenter Sophie Raworth said: “It’s a very important book. It’s a story that would never have been told if he hadn’t gone in search of it. We all thought it had huge resonance with today, the number of displaced people there are today and the number of stories that go untold.”Bart was born in the Netherlands and is bilingual in English...

Imtiaz Dharker, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, selected the iconic Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. In this episode of Ex Libris, released to coincide with the store’s centenary, Imtiaz and Ben are joined by the famed store’s proprietor, Sylvia Whitman.The trio sit and chat on one of the tumbleweed beds that are made available in the shop’s library to aspiring writers. We are transported in this conversation not just to Kilometre Zero of Paris, on which faultline the...

Jacqueline Wilson wrote her first ‘novel’ when she was nine, filling in countless Woolworths exercise books with scribblings.Today, with over 100 books to her name and over 40 million copies of them sold, Jacqueline has gone on to fire young imaginations like few others alive.Her vivid creations - beloved characters such as Tracey Beaker and Hetty Feather - remain inspirations to children everywhere. She is a former Children’s Laureate and was appointed a Dame in 2008.In this episode, Ben...

The podcast that champions and celebrates libraries and independent bookshops, with the help of the greatest writers at work today. Each week, host Ben Holden meets a great author in a library or bookshop of their choice, somewhere special for them.