Always Take Notes

Simon and Eleanor speak to crime writer Ian Rankin, the multi-million copy bestseller of over thirty novels and creator of detective John Rebus. Ian's books have been translated into thirty-six languages and adapted for radio, the stage and the screen. He is the recipient of four Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards, including the Diamond Dagger, the UK’s most prestigious award for crime ficti...

Simon speaks with Hermione Lee, the biographer known for her lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Penelope Fitzgerald. She has chaired the judges of the Man Booker Prize, is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy, is published in the Guardian and regularly contributes to arts programmes on Radio 4. Until last year, Hermione was President of Wol...

Simon and Kassia speak with Richard Skinner, director of the fiction programme at the Faber Academy, one of a number of creative writing schools established outside the traditional university context in recent years. Richard created the academy's flagship 'Writing a Novel' six-month course in 2009 and since then has worked with hundreds of writers. Notable graduates include SJ Watson, whose debut...

Kassia and Simon speak with Cal Flyn, a Scottish author and journalist. Cal worked as an investigative reporter for The Sunday Times and data reporter at the Telegraph before turning to literary non-fiction. Her first book Thicker Than Water, which dealt with colonialism in Australia and intergenerational guilt, was published in 2016 and selected by The Times as one of the best books of the year....

Kassia and Simon speak to Rory Stewart, the MP for Penrith and the Border and the author of Occupational Hazards and The Places in Between, a New York Times bestseller. We spoke to him about his influences and how his feelings about walking memoirs and travel literature have evolved. He also spoke in greater depth about how he came to write The Places in Between and how his relationship with his f...

Simon speaks to Clare Conville, the co-founder of literary agency C+W (formerly Conville and Walsh). Listed by the Observer as one of “Our top 50 players in the world of books”, Clare previously worked as an editor at Random House, before co-founding Conville & Walsh in 2000. Between them Clare’s clients have won or been nominated for nearly every major literary prize in the UK, including the Man...

Kassia and Simon chat to Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times since 2005. We discussed his early career in journalism, which included stints at The Scotsman and a fellowship at the Washington Post, before his move to the Financial Times. He also spoke about his plans for the newspaper, both when he first took over as editor in 2005 and how these may have changed more recently as the idea o...

Simon and Kassia speak to Joanne Harris, author of the 1999 novel Chocolat, which was filmed a year later starring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench and Johnny Depp, as well as numerous other best sellers including Gentleman and Players, Runelight and Peaches For Monsieur le Curé. Joanne talked about her early career as a teacher, dealing with unhelpful advice, the experience of writing a huge best-sel...

Simon and Kassia speak to Niall Ferguson, conservative historian and author of The Ascent of Money and The Pity of War. He talked about his career, financial pressures and the dynamics of writing as a popular historian in the world of academia. You can find us online at alwaystakenotes.com, on Twitter @takenotesalways, and on Facebook at facebook.com/alwaystakenotes. Our crowdfunding page is patre...

Simon and Kassia speak to Louisa Joyner, editorial director at publisher Faber & Faber. Louisa moved to Faber in 2016 from Canongate, and previously worked at HarperCollins, where she published Costa Book of the Year winner Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall and commissioned Curtis Sittenfeld's re-write of Pride and Prejudice - Eligible. Louisa spoke to us about entering publishing from academia...

Kassia speaks to Jeremy Gavron, author of The Book of Israel, (winner of the Encore award), A Woman on the Edge of time and Felix Culpa, a novel pieced together from lines from over eighty other books. Jeremy spoke honestly about many of the relationships that have informed his work, including those with agents and editors and also with his mother, whose story he tells in A Woman on the Edge of Ti...

Kassia and Simon speak to Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of The Pike, a biography of Italian rake Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won all three of the UK's most prestigious prizes for non-fiction for 2013 - The Duff Cooper Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Costa Biography of the Year award. Lucy spoke to us about the rhythms of her work, her relationship with agents and publishers, and her literary...

Kassia and Simon speak to Jonathan Shainin, who runs the Long Read section of the Guardian. He spoke to us about his nomadic career, which took him from New York (and the New Yorker), to Abu Dhabi, India, and back to New York, before coming to London to set up the Long Read in 2014. Jonathan discusses the differences between US and UK editing styles, where the Long Read fits into the wider Guardia...

Kassia and Simon speak to romance novelist Julia Kelly about her portion of the literary universe - romance fiction is a billion-dollar industry. Julia talked to us about how she came to write her first books, the importance of marketing and social media for romance writers, the pros and cons of self-publishing in this genre, and why the happy ending remains non-negotiable. She also discussed the...

Kassia and Simon interview screenwriter and playwright Peter Moffat, whose work includes the series Cambridge Spies, Criminal Justice - later the basis of HBO's The Night of - and Silk, as well as the TV films Hawking and Einstein & Eddington. Peter spoke about moving from his early career as a lawyer into writing, the distinctions between British and American approaches to producing TV drama, and...

Kassia and Simon interview Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman. She spoke to us about what her current role entails, the training she received as a sub-editor at the Daily Mail (and what it was like to work there). Helen candidly discussed the importance of networking, feminism, sub-editing and longform journalism. She also revealed a brilliant tip for powering through writers' block....

Simon speaks to Max Hastings, the best-selling military historian and erstwhile foreign correspondent and newspaper editor. They discussed Max's early career - how 1960s and 70s Fleet Street really was, without the benefit of rose-tinted spectacles - his experiences in the Falklands in 1982, the development of his book writing, from early ventures to his doorstopper World War Two histories, and th...

Kassia and Simon speak to Hannah Westland, the publisher at Serpent's Tail, an independent imprint that published Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin and Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent. She spoke to us about her early career — she started out as a literary agent — some of the projects she's currently working on and the role of independent firms in the publishing marketplace. https://serp...

Simon speaks to Laura Palmer, publishing director for fiction at Head of Zeus, an independent publishing house in London. Laura co-founded Head of Zeus in 2012, having started her career at Quercus Books, and she also worked at Corvus, the commercial fiction imprint of Atlantic Books. We spoke about what 'commercial fiction' precisely means, whether 'women's fiction' is still a useful label, best...

Kassia and Simon chat to Ben Judah, the journalist and author of This is London and Fragile Empire. He told us about how he got into writing, the influence on his work of Polish reportage styles and why he's decided to take a little break from Twitter. (We were on Skype, so please excuse the odd rough patch.) https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-London-Life-Death-World/dp/1447274792 https://www.amazon.co...

Kassia and Simon interview Patrick Kingsley, a correspondent with the New York Times. Patrick previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian, based in Cairo and Istanbul. His first book, How To Be Danish (2012), was an exploration of contemporary Danish society. His second book, The New Odyssey (2016), chronicled the European refugee crisis, and was one of NPR's books of the yea...

Kassia interviews Nikesh Shukla, a TV and fiction writer. We spoke about his novels Coconut Unlimited and Meatspace, and how he came to edit The Good Immigrant, the collection of essays about race and immigration and what it means to be a model "good immigrant" in the UK. You can find us online at alwaystakenotes.com, on Twitter @takenotesalways, and on Facebook at facebook.com/alwaystakenotes. Al...

Kassia and Simon interview Antony Beevor, the celebrated military historian. Best known as author of Stalingrad, the runaway success which on publication in 1998 transformed military history as a genre, Antony has also written on the Spanish Civil War, the battles of Crete and Berlin, and D-Day. His latest book Arnhem – The Last German Victory, will be published in May 2018. Antony, who is also a...

Simon interviews Sam Knight, a British writer who works mainly for the Guardian and the New Yorker and specialises in longform pieces on unusual topics, such as the UK sandwich industry and the psychology of a stalker. They discuss his entry into journalism, his love of classic American nonfiction and how he puts features together. https://harpers.org/archive/2014/02/a-god-more-powerful-than-i/ ht...

Kassia speaks to Joelle Owusu, an editor at Unbound, the innovative publishing company that aims to use crowd-funding to shake up the way books are produced, paid for and disseminated. Joelle explained how Unbound's business model works, how it compares to traditional publishing, and how they aim to give voice to writers that have traditionally faced a sceptical response from the industry. She als...