Ruth Jones is best known for playing Nessa in Gavin and Stacey - the BBC TV comedy she co-wrote with James Corden - and also for starring in and writing the comedy series Stella, set in her native South Wales. Earlier this year she also wrote her first novel, Never Greener, which tells the story of a rekindled affair. It sparked a 10-way publishers bidding war and was immediately propelled to the top of the bestseller charts upon its release. Ruth lives in South Wales with her husband David,...

Jojo Moyes was born in 1969 and grew up in London and went on to work as a minicab controller, braille typer and brochure writer for Club 18-30, before settling on journalism.  She worked as a journalist for ten years, including a year at South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, and nine at The Independent, before leaving to becoming a full-time novelist in 2002 around the publication of her first book, Sheltering Rain was published.  Since then she has written a further eleven novels,...

Sebastian Faulks began his writing career as a journalist - including a stint at the Daily Telegraph - before publishing his first novel, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, in 1989. He’s gone on to write over a dozen more novels, including Charlotte Gray, Engleby, and Human Traces -- but is perhaps best known for Birdsong, a war novel and family saga which moves between the trenches of World War One and late-1970s England, and which consistently appears on surveys of the nation’s favourite books. His...

Growing up, Marian Keyes never thought of herself as a writer - and came to her profession almost by accident in the early 1990s.    She has since become one of Ireland’s most successful novelists - with over 35 million copies of her thirteen works sold to date. Keyes is beloved to her readers for her wit, her conversational prose style, and for the unflinching honesty with which she approaches her subjects, which include depression, infidelity domestic abuse and the glass ceiling.    Here,...

Born in London in 1954, Louis de Bernières published his first book in 1990 and since then has written two volumes of poetry, numerous works of short fiction and eight novels. He’s best known for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a musical, richly-layered love story, set during the Second World War - which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Novel in 1994 and was later made into a film with Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz. In a lively and unusually revealing conversation, he speaks to the...

Discover the literary secrets of some of the UK's best-known authors, including Marian Keyes, Sebastian Faulks, Louis de Bernières and Jojo Moyes. Each sits down in conversation with the Telegraph's Laura Powell, accompanied by the four books that they treasure above all others.  My Life In Books.