Write-Off with Francesca Steele

Since releasing this episode in January, Pineapple Street, now out in the UK, has become a New York Times bestseller! Enjoy!

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Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best b…

If you want to write domestic fiction I cannot recommend reading Tessa Hadley, or indeed listening to her here, enough. 

Tessa, who has been long-listed twice for what is now the Women’s Prize and who…

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of six novels including Less and Less is Lost, which are both bittersweet, tragicomic road trip tales about Arthur Less, a failing and flailing …

Monica Heisey is the author of the very funny Really Good, Actually, which just came out a week ago and became an instant Sunday times bestseller. It’s about a woman in her twenties getting divorced,…

Last year, Alan Garner became the oldest person ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, at the age of 87, for his novel Treacle Walker. Alan has been writing novels and other books for more than…

Jenny Jackson’s forthcoming novel Pineapple Street is one of the best books I’ve read in the last year, but Jenny is also a Vice President and Executive Editor at Knopf, so she knows all about publis…

Good news for Peep Show fans! I am so delighted to have Robert Webb on the podcast today. Rob's memoir How Not To Be A Boy is one of my favourite books ever, a brilliant look at Rob's background and …

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw’s book of deliciously vibrant and rebellious short stories about sex and black women navigating social pressures, won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Aw…

I am on a little break from Season 3 for Christmas this week, but I thought you might enjoy a replay of my interview with Meg Mason in July last year, in which she talks about the traumatic experienc…

Who deserves to be a writer? When Sarah Turner was in her early twenties she had a baby, found it challenging and, unable to find writing online to match her experience, set up a blog. A couple of ye…

My guest this week is so well-known that his unfinished manuscripts and first drafts have been displayed at the National Library of Scotland. Sir Ian Rankin has published more than 35 books in his 36…

My guest today is the fabulous Bonnie Garmus! Despite wanting to be a writer all her life, Bonnie’s debut Lessons in Chemistry was published when she was 64. The book, about Elizabeth Zott, a formida…

It’s hard to express quite how much I love Liane Moriarty's writing. I have read all of her books, some of them many times, and I just think she combines such a good eye for women's interior lives an…

You probably know David Duchovny from decades on our screens as the FBI agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files and the TV show Californication, as well as the recent Judd Apatow film The Bubble and last yea…

This interview has a special place in my heart because Joanne Harris, the prolific author known for the gorgeous Chocolat, among other things, was the first person I ever interviewed. I spoke to her …

Jeffrey Archer is a bit different from many of my usual guests. He’s not at all sentimental, he’s very confident – I mean this is a former MP who went to prison for perjury after all – and in many wa…

I loved talking to Abi Elphinstone, a bestselling children’s author who writes about dreamsnatchers and sky gods and wildcats. She has been called a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis by The Times, and t…

Chris Paling, a BBC radio producer, had an auspicious start as a writer, accidentally stumbling across a very starry agent with his first attempt at writing a novel. That novel didn’t actually sell t…

If you don’t already know Sandra Newman, you are going to be hearing a lot about her in the next year or so. Her new book, The Men, about a world in which everyone with a Y chromosome vanishes, is ou…

When The Girl on the Train came out in 2015 and went straight to number one on global bestseller lists Paula Hawkins was pitched like a debut. But in fact Paula had written several previous novels, r…