Page One - The Writer's Podcast

Cathy Bramley is the Sunday Times Top Ten best-selling author of THE LEMON TREE CAFE. Her other romantic comedies include Ivy Lane, Appleby Farm, Wickham Hall, Conditional Love, The Plumberry School of Comfort Food and White Lies and Wishes. Cathy turned to writing after spending eighteen years running her own marketing agency. Her latest book is My Kind of Happy. We had a great chat with Cathy, h...

Owen Nicholls is a screenwriter with a Masters in Scriptwriting from the University of East Anglia. His first screenplay -- a biopic of the filmmakers Powell and Pressburger -- was optioned to Bedlam Productions, the BAFTA and Academy Award-winning producers of The King's Speech . His work has appeared in Empire and NME, and in 2018 he was selected for the Escalator Scheme run by the National Cent...

Dirk Maggs is the genius behind the audio adaptations of stories such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy , The X Files , the William Gibson Alien 3 adaptation - and of course, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , which has been a huge (and well deserved) hit on Audible. We talk to Dirk to find out how he forged this career, and learn that he in effect created the idea of these “audio movies” (as he ca...

Ian Dunt is a political commentator and journalist. He is editor of politics.co.uk, an energetic presence on Twitter, and appears as a pundit on BBC TV, Sky News and Al-Jazeera. He is also the author of two books - Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? and the just released How To Be A Liberal, which is an important, interesting and entertaining guide to the principles and practices of liberalism and...

Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of novels such as Zoo City, Broken Monsters, and, of course, the international bestseller, The Shining Girls. Her latest novel, Afterland, is a noir road-trip set in a post-pandemic America where 99.9% of the men have all been wiped out. We had a lot of fun chatting to Lauren about her writing career, hearing about how she managed to get her first publishi...

Alastair Campbell is best known for his role as Tony Blair’s chief spokesman and strategist. He has written several bestselling non-fiction and fiction books, including The Blair Years and Winners . A former 'Mind Champion of the Year', he is an ambassador for several mental health charities. His latest book, Living Better, is his honest, moving and life affirming account of his lifelong struggle...

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of twenty-five or so novels and collections, and there’s some novellas and comic books in there as well. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, a Bram Stoker Award, four This is Horror Awards, and he’s been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and t...

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland, and the short story collection, Growing Things and Other Stories. His latest novel, Survivor Song, is a terrifying thriller about an outbrea...

David Quantick is the Emmy-award winning writer of Veep , The Thick of It , TV Burp and much more. He has worked with comedy legends such as Harry Hill and Chris Morris, and is currently continuing his longstanding contribution with Armando Iannucci on his latest series, Avenue 5 . He is also a journalist, having worked many years for the NME, and more recently began to write novels, the most rece...

Joe Cornish is the writer and director of films such as Attack the Block and The Kid Who Would be King . He began his career working with his comedy partner Adam Buxton on the brilliant The Adam and Joe Show on Channel 4, before co-writing first Ant-man and then The Adventures of Tintin with Edgar Wright. Recently, he, Edgar, Nira Park and Rachael Prior have formed Complete Fiction Production to c...

Adam Christopher’s   debut novel  Empire State  was  SciFiNow ’s Book of the Year and a  Financial Times  Book of the Year. The author of  Made To Kill ,  Standard Hollywood Depravity  and  Killing Is My Business , Adam’s other novels include  Seven Wonders ,  The Age Atomic  and  The Burning Dark . A contrib...

Tendai Huchu is a Zimbabwean author who now lives in Edinburgh, and whose first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare , was a huge hit, being nominated for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. He followed that up with The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Magician , and is soon to release the first book in The Library of the Dead series, about a young girl who delivers messages for ghosts in a post-apoca...

Sheila O'Flanagan is an international bestselling author of books such as The Hideaway, What Happened That Night and Suddenly Single. All of her books center around strong female protagonists who find themselves in difficult situations that mean they have to find their inner strength. Her latest book, The Women Who Ran Away, is out in July. We had a great chat with Sheila, hearing about how she sw...

Chris Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of his award-winning debut  Quite Ugly One Morning , which established him as one of Britain’s leading crime novelists. His 2016 novel  Black Widow  won both the McIlvanney Prize and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. Writing under the name Ambrose Parry, he has also co-...

Thomas Welsh is an award winning urban fantasy and short story author based in Scotland. He was the winner of the Elbow Room fiction prize for And Then I was Floating and has also been published in The 404 Ink F Word Collection , Pseudopod and Leicester Writes . More recently, he has released Anna Undreaming and its sequel, Anna and the Midnight Road , the first two parts of his urban fantasy Meti...

Alexandra Sokoloff is the bestselling, Thriller Award-winning and Bram Stoker and Anthony Award-nominated author of thirteen supernatural, paranormal and crime thrillers. The  New York Times  has called her “a daughter of Mary Shelley” and her books “Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre.” As a screenwriter she has sold original suspense and horror scripts and...

Alex De Campi is a comics writer and author, who has been nominated for numerous Eisner awards and has recently collaborated with film director Duncan Jones on the graphic novel, Madi , the latest chapter in his Moon series of films. She has also just released her highly anticipated novel debut, The Scottish Boy , a thrilling adventure set in medieval Britain. We had a great chat with Alex talking...

Laura Lam is a sci fi and fantasy author whose latest book is Goldilocks, a bold, thought-provoking and high concept feminist dystopian thriller, best described as a cross between The Martian and The Handmaid's Tale. We've been lucky enough to read it, and it is a good one! We loved hearing from Laura about all the research she put into Goldilocks to make sure it rang true, and also had a great di...

Struan Murray is a young Scottish author, whose recently released debut novel Orphans of the Tide has received rave reviews, even earning him comparisons to Philip Pullman. A dark gothic kids fantasy, it’s easy to see why people think of stories such as Northern Lights. We had great fun chatting to Struan about his long process to getting published, including the value of writing courses, and also...

Harriet Tyce is a Sunday Times Bestselling Author whose debut novel, Blood Orange , was a huge hit and featured on Richard & Judy’s Book Club list in 2019. A domestic noir set in the UK legal world, it is a twisty tale of murder and quite a few flawed characters! We had a really interesting chat with Harriet, hearing about how the long path to her debut with Blood Orange, how being selected fo...

Neil Forsyth is a Scottish author and screenwriter who has written critically acclaimed TV shows such as Eric, Ernie and Me , as well as the infamous Bob Servant , the Dundee cheeseburger svengali portrayed by Brian Cox on TV, and now a Twitter phenomenon. Most recently, he created and wrote the hit BBC show Guilt , a dark crime comedy about two brothers whose night home from a wedding doesn't qui...

It's the Return of the Mike as friend of the podcast Mike Carey returns to chat with us about his latest novel, The Book of Koli, set in a post-apocalyptic Britain. We also had time to talk about his latest comic series, The Dollhouse Family, and gained lots of hints and tips about how to create new worlds. Links: Buy The Book of Koli and Mike's other books Buy The Dollhouse Family The Page One Po...

Christian Divine is a screenwriter and video game writer whose credits include the seminal cyberpunk game Deus Ex. More recently, Christian was lead writer on the amazing Life Is Strange games from DontNod Entertainment which tell the stories of teenage kids with supernatural powers growing up in small-town USA. We had a really interesting chat with Christian about how he came to be a writer, and...

After working in Scottish politics, Jonathan Whitelaw moved into journalism before becoming an author. Subjects he has covered in the press have varied from breaking news, the arts, culture and sport to fashion, music and even radioactive waste - with everything in between. He's also a regular reviewer and talking head on shows for the BBC and STV. His debut novel was Morbid Relations, a darkly co...

Gareth L Powell is an award-winning British sci-fi author whose amazing worlds have found him a loyal following. Best known for his Embers of War trilogy, his novels have twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and have been finalists for both the Locus Award in the US and the Seiun Award in Japan. He is also the first person to have had individual work shortlisted i...