“One of the great Scottish crime writers is back”: The April Dead by Alan Parks is crime Book of the Month in The Times.

“I would think to myself, why do some people rise up and fight while others do nothing?” she said. “Are people justified in doing anything and everything possible for the sake of justice? How do we balance our desire to fight for change against our desire to protect the ones we love? These are questions the characters have to deal with. I do not have answers — I much prefer to ask questions.”

Imbolo Mbue discusses her new novel How Beautiful We Were in the New York Times.

To celebrate the first ever Gray Day – a celebration of the life and work of Alasdair Gray on 25th February 2021 – there will be a special Gray Day Broadcast, featuring guests like Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Gemma Cairney, Irvine Welsh, Ewen Bremner and more to be announced!

[update: Now that the Broadcast has run it is still available to view.]

‘It moves at an exhilarating lick, as befits its pop culture propensities, but with highbrow sensibilities, its concerns including the Kabbalah, whether the world is made of words, the origins of the alphabet, the mythopoetic nature of the hero’s journey and what angels look like … the genius of the book is that despite it seeming like an elegant orrery, all these wheels within wheels are a carapace, a psychic armour against a grief (and it’s not the grief you were expecting). Beneath this truly beautiful astrolabe is a beating human heart’

‘As the early drafts of the book developed I started collecting deaths, near deaths and unmourned deaths, invisible deaths and celebrity death and writing about them. I also started testing the work out at my poetry gigs. I’d slip an excerpt of the book into my poetry shows to see how Mrs Death landed with my poetry friends and with spoken word and book festival audiences. I began to notice different responses in different cities and different counties … I’m fascinated by this and hope to examine it further: I wonder if here in the UK we exhibit grief and talk about death and mourn a little differently county by county? Do we mourn differently geographically?’

Salena Godden is featured on the Waterstones blog about writing her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, and how we respond to death across the country.

Courttia Newland discusses astral projection, rejection, racism, Small Axe and his new novel, A River Called Time with the Guardian

‘When I was growing up I used to have these episodes where you wake up and feel like you can’t breathe, you can’t see, you’re almost having a seizure, a dreaming seizure. I’d fight it and try to wake up – but this one time, around 1997, I didn’t fight it and I had an out of body experience, like I actually rose from my body. I could see somebody in the room sitting next to the bed. The experience stuck in my head and I thought, “Let me find out what’s been happening.” I found all these books saying it was astral projection. And that was it. I knew I wanted to write about astral projection.’