In Writing with Hattie Crisell

Australian writer Liane Moriarty joins me this week from her family home in Sydney. Liane has written nine novels, including her latest mystery Apples Never Fall , and has sold over 20 million books worldwide. She is perhaps best known as the author of Big Little Lies  and  Nine Perfect Strangers , which were adapted into glossy TV series starring Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Melissa McCar...

Today's interview is with the writer and editor Craig Taylor, who dials in from an island shack off the coast of western Canada. Once a Guardian contributor, with his column One Million Tiny Plays About Britain (which became a book and a play), Craig has since become known for oral histories including 2006's Return to Akenfield and 2011's  Londoners.  For his latest book New Yorkers , he collected...

It's wonderful to have novelist Meg Mason on the podcast this week. On holiday in June, I got more hooked on her novel  Sorrow and Bliss than I have been on perhaps any other book of this year.  Speaking to me from Sydney in August, Meg talked about her complicated feelings about the memoir she published in 2012 and the unpublished novel she completed just before Sorrow and Bliss . She gave some u...

Not a normal In Writing  episode today, but a wholehearted recommendation for something new . This is a guest episode of the excellent podcast The Offcuts Drawer with Laura Shavin, on which successful writers share the contents of their bottom drawer – the bits of writing they never finished, had rejected or just like to hold on to for nostalgic reasons. Actors perform these pieces and the writer...

This week's guest is The Guardian 's John Crace, writer of satirical parliamentary sketches, as well as a personal diary column. For a long time John also wrote the paper's Digested Read , in which each week, he summed up a new book in a few funny paragraphs. He's published several books himself, on topics as varied as football, cricket and Shakespeare, as well as collections of his columns, inclu...

This week I sit down with Christine Rose at her home in London, to find out all about a job that most people aren't aware exists. Christine works behind the scenes in comedy and entertainment, writing jokes for shows including Have I Got News for You and 8 out of 10 Cats ; chat-show monologues for the likes of Graham Norton and Alan Carr; and funny host scripts for awards ceremonies like the BAFTA...

This week, armed with tea and Jaffa cakes, I speak to the writer Amer Anwar at his home in west London. Amer is the author of Brothers in Blood and Stone Cold Trouble  – crime thrillers set in Southall, populated by British Asian gangsters, and peppered with punch-ups, Punjabi swear words, and cunning plans.  Before Amer had even finished a draft of his first book, it won the Crime Writers’ Associ...

I'm thrilled to be back for a fourth series, and to be kicking it off with such an interesting guest. Elif Shafak is a British-Turkish novelist who has published 19 books including 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World , The Forty Rules of Love and Three Daughters of Eve . Her most recent book is The Island of Missing Trees , which is a twisty tale of love and war, told in part from the pers...

This is a bonus episode with a writer who, in a way, has carved out a bonus career: Graham Norton. Long-established as a hugely successful presenter and comedian in the UK, he published his first novel, Holding , in 2016, and has followed that with 2018's A Keeper , and most recently last year's Home Stretch . They are well-plotted, sensitively written novels that turn the spotlight on small-town...

In the final episode of the third series (thank you for listening!), Maggie O'Farrell joins me from her home in Edinburgh. Maggie is the author of eight novels, including After You'd Gone , This Must Be The Place and Hamnet , which last year won the Women's Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the unsettling 2017 memoir  I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.  She describes the Victorian green...

James Acaster joins me this week to talk about writing stand-up comedy. James has filmed five stand-up specials – the first four make up the series Repertoire , available on Netflix, while the most recent, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, arrived on Vimeo earlier this month. He was also nominated a record-breaking five years in a row for Best Comedy Show at the Edinburgh Fringe, from 2012 to 2016. H...

This week I'm joined by Wendy Erskine, author of the remarkable  Sweet Home , an award-winning short story collection set in modern Belfast. I have a personal connection to Wendy – she was my English teacher in the mid-nineties, and is still a teacher today. She talks about how she found her way to publishing an acclaimed collection in 2018; how her 'imagination headphones' allow her to work at th...

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. This turns out to be Will's process: he also tells me about his zero-distractions writing routine at home, which involves a black-out blind and total immersion. I first discovered Will's work through the brilliant book The Science of Storytelling ; he's a...

The writer and illustrator Cressida Cowell joins me this week, with a backdrop of birdsong from outside her writing shed. Cressida wrote and illustrated the Wizards of Once series, and the How to Train Your Dragon series, which became a highly successful Dreamworks franchise. She also wrote the Emily Brown picture books, and is passionate about getting kids into reading, and showing them that whet...

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. George's new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain , uses classic Russian short stories to analyse good writing and storytelling. His special skill, o...

Grace Dent – Guardian restaurant critic, columnist, author and Masterchef star – joins me from her bed this week. With a string of young adult novels under her belt (including the Diary of a Chav and Diary of a Snob series), Grace has most recently written Hungry : a memoir of food, family, and conquering the London journalism scene as a working-class northerner. Recording in November 2020, we cha...

Brandon Taylor, author of the novel Real Life , joins me from Iowa this week. At the end of a whirlwind year in which his debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Brandon talks about how he emerged as a novelist from an illiterate family; why he objects to the idea that it's easy for black writers to write black characters; and why 'It's only a draft' can be a game-changing thought. Support the...

In this bonus episode, I speak to London Grammar‘s Hannah Reid, songwriter and vocalist. Ahead of the release of the band's third album, Californian Soil, Hannah talked about the value and risk of vulnerability in songwriting. Californian Soil is out on 9th April, and you can hear singles Baby It’s You, Californian Soil and Lose Your Head now. To continue the conversation about writing, come and f...

This week, John Lanchester joins me from his writing shed at the bottom of the garden. John has just published a new collection of spooky short stories – Reality & Other Stories – and has also written five novels, including Capital (which became a BBC series) and The Wall. He's a winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the E.M Forster Award, among others, and is also a journalist and wri...

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. Lucy lets us into the secrets of that writers' room, sheds light on the relationship between writers and actors, and reflects on what she learnt from quitting her first TV success, Secre...

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 Ch...

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 c...

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...

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 pe...