Always Take Notes

Simon and Rachel speak with the biographer Adam Sisman. After an initial career in publishing, Adam's first book, a biography of historian A.J.P. Taylor, appeared in 1994. His second, "Boswell's Presumptuous Task" (2000), won the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and he has subsequently written biographies of another historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the espionage novelist John...

Rachel and Simon speak with the novelist Victoria Hislop. After studying English at university, Victoria worked in book publishing, PR and journalism. She turned to fiction in 2005 with “The Island”, a love story set on Spinalonga, Greece’s former leprosy colony. The novel was translated into 40 languages and sold more than six million copies worldwide; it was adapted into a 26-part Greek televisi...

Simon and Rachel speak with Anjan Sundaram, an award-winning author, journalist and television presenter, whose war correspondence has won a Frontline Club Award and a Reuters prize. Anjan's previous books are "Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship" (an Amazon Book of the Year) and "Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo" (a Royal African Society Book of the Year). He has reported from...

Rachel and Simon speak with Sarah Braybrooke, publishing director at Ithaka Press, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. Sarah started her career in publicity, first at Profile, then at Scribe, an independent publishing house based in Australia. She stayed with Scribe for 12 years, becoming managing director of Scribe UK in 2017, and publisher in 2020. During her time there, Sarah worked on titles inclu...

Simon and Rachel speak with the author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce. "Millions", his debut children's novel, published in 2004, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal. He is also the author of "Noah's Gold", "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again", "Cosmic", "Framed", "The Astounding Broccoli Boy" and "Runaway Robot". His books have been shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the Guardian C...

Rachel and Simon speak with the nature writer and novelist Helen Macdonald. "H is for Hawk", a memoir of grief and falconry published in 2014, won several prizes including the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. "Vesper Flights", a collection of essays, was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2020. "Prophet", her latest book, is a sci-fi novel co-written with Sin Blaché....

Simon and Rachel speak with the novelist Lee Child, one of the world’s leading thriller writers. Lee - real name James Grant - was born in Coventry in 1954, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in the United States. He began his writing career after he was made redundant from Granada Television in the 1990s. Today the novels featuring his hero, former military policeman Jack Reacher, consistently a...

In this episode Rachel and Simon speak with the novelist and journalist Megan Nolan. Her essays and reviews have been published by the Guardian and the New York Times, among other publications. Her debut novel, "Acts of Desperation", was published in 2021 and received a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize....

Simon and Rachel speak to James Daunt, who runs both Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest retail bookseller, and Waterstones, the largest retail bookseller in the United Kingdom. James currently oversees approximately 600 Barnes & Noble shops in the United States and 293 Waterstones locations across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium. After an early career as an investment banker, James o...

Rachel and Simon speak to Francesca Main, publisher of Phoenix Books, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group which in turn is part of Hachette. She started her career at Penguin, first in the rights department and then as an editorial assistant at Hamish Hamilton; she then spent four years as a commissioning editor at Simon & Schuster. She joined Picador as editorial director in 2011 and launche...

Simon and Rachel speak with Albert Read, who runs magazine publisher Condé Nast in the UK and recently published a book called "The Imagination Muscle", about the genesis of ideas. Albert has launched and led businesses for Condé Nast in the UK, and across Europe and Asia, overseeing titles such as Vogue, GQ, Wired, Condé Nast Traveller and Vanity Fair. A former journalist, he has written for the ...

Rachel and Simon speak with the literary agent and novelist Abigail Bergstrom. She started her career at the publisher Simon & Schuster in 2011; by 2014 she had been promoted to commissioning editor. She was then headhunted to set up and launch the literary arm of Gleam Futures, a talent-management agency, and oversaw the publication of several bestselling books. In 2020 Abigail was nominated for...

Simon and Rachel speak with Nels Abbey, a British-Nigerian writer, media executive and satirist who co-founded the Black Writers Guild in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. A former banker, Nels's first book, "Think Like a White Man", was published in 2019. Penned under the alter-ego ‘Professor Boulé Whytelaw III’, the book is a satire of modern racial discourse and politics in...

Rachel and Simon speak with the literary agent Sophie Lambert. After working as a bookseller and a book buyer in London for several years, Sophie moved to New York and spent three years there as an assistant at Janklow & Nesbit. She moved back to London and started her own list at Tibor Jones and Associates before joining C&W in 2013. She became a director and later managing director; in 2019 Soph...

Simon and Rachel speak with the screenwriter and novelist Jed Mercurio. A former hospital doctor and Royal Air Force officer, Jed made his entry into television after he answered an advert in the British Medical Journal seeking advisors for a hospital drama. Although he had limited experience, he was soon scripting the BBC series "Cardiac Arrest". Jed's subsequent television credits include "Bodie...

Rachel and Simon speak with the literary agent Carrie Plitt. She began her career in publishing in the rights department at Penguin, before moving to the literary agency Conville and Walsh in 2011. In 2016 she joined Felicity Bryan Associates and the authors she now represents include Reni Eddo-Lodge, Catherine Belton and Natasha Lunn. In 2018 Carrie was included on the Bookseller's list of rising...

Simon and Rachel speak to David Wolf, who runs the Long Read section of the Guardian newspaper, publishing in-depth reporting, profiles and essays. David has worked at the Long Read since the section was founded in 2014 – first as commissioning editor, then overall editor. During that time, the Long Read has published over 1,000 pieces and David has personally edited articles on a wide variety of...

Rachel and Simon speak to the journalist and author Sally Hayden, who won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022 for her book "My Fourth Time, We Drowned". Currently the Africa correspondent for the Irish Times, she has also worked with the BBC, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 2019 she was included on Forbes's "30 Under 30"...

Simon and Rachel speak with Fraser Nelson, who has edited the Spectator magazine since 2009. Previously a financial journalist with the Times and political editor of the Scotsman, during his tenure at the Spectator Fraser has overseen a near doubling of the magazine’s sales. He is also a columnist with the Daily Telegraph, sits on the board of the Centre for Social Justice, a centre-right think ta...

Rachel and Simon speak with the literary agent Karolina Sutton. After a brief stint in advertising, she got a job as an agents' assistant and quickly started putting together her own list. She has worked with authors including Margaret Atwood, Ed Caesar, Anthony Doerr, Haruki Murakami, Tara Westover and Malala Yousafzai. In 2020 she won Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards. Earlier this ye...

Simon and Rachel speak with the novelist Ian McEwan, the critically acclaimed author of 17 novels and two short-story collections. His first published work, a collection of short stories, "First Love, Last Rites", won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. Ian's novels include "The Child in Time", which won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 1987; "The Cement Garden"; "Enduring Love"; "Amsterda...

Rachel and Simon speak with the novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley. She is the author of eight novels, including "Accidents in the Home" (2002), for which she was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and "The Past" (2015), which won a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. Tessa regularly publishes stories in the New Yorker; a new collection of her short fiction, "After the Funeral"...

Simon and Rachel speak to Orlando Figes, author of nine books on Russian and European history which have been translated into over 30 languages. Born in London, Figes studied history at Cambridge and, as a graduate student, completed archival research in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He rose to prominence in 1996 with his second book, "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924", which...

Rachel and Simon speak to Moya Lothian-McLean, contributing editor at Novara Media. She began writing articles about music for Vice in 2015 while studying at university; in 2016, after graduating, she joined Stylist as an editorial assistant and wrote features as well as articles for the website. In 2020 she joined gal-dem, an independent magazine, as politics editor. Now she is contributing edito...

Simon and Rachel speak to the novelist Mohsin Hamid. Born in Lahore, he grew up mostly in Pakistan but spent part of his childhood in California and returned to America to attend Princeton University. He worked in New York and London as a management consultant before returning to Lahore to pursue writing full-time. Mohsin's first novel, "Moth Smoke" (2000), was published in 14 languages and won a ...