James Acaster joins me this week to talk about writing stand-up comedy.

This week I'm joined by Wendy Erskine, author of the remarkable Sweet Home, an award-winning short story collection set in modern Belfast.

Back in early November 2020, Will Storr spoke to me from a solo writing retreat in Spain, where he was working, sleeping and doing nothing else.

The writer and illustrator Cressida Cowell joins me this week, with a backdrop of birdsong from outside her writing shed.

This week I speak to George Saunders: author of 11 books including the 2017 Man Booker Prize winner Lincoln in the Bardo; regular contributor of short fiction to The New Yorker for almost 30 years; and creative writing teacher at Syracuse University.

Grace Dent – Guardian restaurant critic, columnist, author and Masterchef star – joins me from her bed this week.

Brandon Taylor, author of the novel Real Life, joins me from Iowa this week.

In this bonus episode, I speak to London Grammar‘s Hannah Reid, songwriter and vocalist.

This week, John Lanchester joins me from his writing shed at the bottom of the garden.

Season 3 is here! My first guest is Lucy Prebble, playwright of A Very Expensive Poison and Enron; showrunner of the Sky series I Hate Suzie; and part of Jesse Armstrong's writing team on the HBO drama Succession.

My final guest of the second series is Jon Ronson: journalist, documentary-maker, screenwriter, and author of wonderful narrative longform non-fiction. Jon’s books include The Psychopath Test and So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and he tells me about the complicated legacy of the latter. In his work he’s delved into some murky worlds, including the Ku Klux Klan, the pornography industry and the Church of Scientology, and found the humour and pathos in subjects that most of us would overlook....

Kit de Waal, whose books include My Name Is Leon, The Trick to Time and the new short story collection Supporting Cast, joins me this week from her home in the West Midlands. Kit started writing in her mid-forties, and remembers being stunned by how hard it was. In our chat she reflects honestly on that time, the stories that worked, the novels that didn’t, and how getting too interested in her characters tripped her up. She also spills the beans on her plotting spreadsheet, her knack for...

TV writer Robert Popper joins me for a chat this week, fresh off the sixth series of his Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner. Robert has been involved in some of the best British comedy of the last 20 years; he co-wrote the cult favourite Look Around You, a spoof science documentary series that ran from 2002 to 2005, and worked as a script editor on Peep Show, The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd. He is also the alter ego of Robin Cooper, author of The Timewaster Letters. He tells me how he...

Mhairi McFarlane is the author of six great novels in the genre of romantic comedy/chick lit (delete as preferred), including her most recent, If I Never Met You. This week she speaks to me from her front room – she does not have or want a study – about the process of rewriting her first book, You Had Me At Hello, and what she learned along the way, plus the essential components of a good romcom.

This week I chat to Will Harris, a London-born poet and essayist of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage. Will’s debut poetry collection RENDANG came out in February; previously he was perhaps best known for the essay Mixed-Race Superman, which was published in 2018, and which The New York Times called “A zany, exuberant and highly original meditation on what it means to come of age as a mixed-race person in a predominantly white world.” He spoke to me about how engaging with his family history...

Alexandra Shulman joins me this week to talk about life on both sides of the divide: editor and writer. At the helm of Vogue, she spent 25 years herding journalists. Now she has a column in the Mail on Sunday and has this year published a book that blends memoir with fashion history, Clothes and Other Things that Matter. We talk about the article that changed her career, the challenge of writing two novels with a full-time job, and the value of storytelling in journalism.

This week, from my living room in London, I speak to Robert Webb in his loft study (also in London). By the time Robert published his memoir How Not To Be A Boy in 2017, he’d already achieved huge success as an actor and performer (memorably, of course, in Peep Show). We discuss that book and his new novel Come Again; how his instinct to entertain translates from the screen to the page, and how years of writing comedy sketches gave him insight into characterisation.

Kiley Reid joins me for this episode of In Writing, recorded when she visited London in February to promote her bestselling debut novel Such A Fun Age. Kiley is a graduate of the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she shaped this novel, and we talk about how the feedback of other writers helped her hone it, how to flesh out fiction with well-researched fact, and why it’s essential to “write to your obsessions”.

This week’s guest is the sharp and funny Hugo Rifkind, award-winning columnist for The Times. In the attic of his house in north London – not long before recording a podcast in person started to look like insanity – we had a great discussion about his journalistic career, how he approaches the (nightmarish) challenge of a weekly opinion column, and what he’s learnt about writing satire from his very funny diary series, My Week.

The second series of In Writing is here in the midst of a pandemic, and while going into writers’ workspaces may not be practical for a while, that doesn’t mean we can’t pretend. This week, from my duvet fort in London, I speak to Curtis Sittenfeld in her small, distraction-free study (which she likens to Harry Potter’s under-stair bedroom) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Curtis is the author of five bestselling novels, including Prep, American Wife and Eligible, and a book of short stories, You...

In this last episode of the series, Charlie Brooker – the man behind Black Mirror, the BBC’s Wipe shows, Dead Set, Nathan Barley, TV Go Home and more – invites me into his messy, makeshift study. We talk about his unique career trajectory, the process of writing a Netflix show, and the ongoing, necessary pain of taking feedback on your work. Logo by Ben Neale

This week, in a garden cabin in Sussex, I speak to Anna Hope: the author of two historical novels – Wake and The Ballroom – and Expectation, one of the most talked-about books of 2019. Anna was an actress when, in her early thirties, she started taking creative writing courses; she reflects on that transition, the struggles she went through before being published, and how she found her flow as an author. Logo by Ben Neale

For a while I’ve been looking for a chance to pick Andrew Billen’s brain about how he writes his insightful, revealing profiles of celebrities and politicians for The Times, and in this episode I visit him at his family home in Oxford to do just that. Andrew looks back on 30 years of interviews, talks me through his ‘essay plan’, and reveals some of the most and least successful encounters he’s had in his career. Logo by Ben Neale

The author of Animals and Adults – and winner of Best Debut Screenwriter at last year’s British Independent Film Awards – Emma Jane Unsworth welcomes me into her twinkly Brighton flat. She talks about how to overcome the moments of self-loathing that come with any creative project; postnatal depression and recovery; and why she never gets the ending right on a first try. Logo by Ben Neale

Author of Call Me By Your Name and its recent sequel Find Me, Andre Aciman tells me what it’s like to see your novel get a second life in film (and the new flock of young fans who followed); why he has no interest in realism, and why it’s valuable to read all your reviews. Logo by Ben Neale