Draw-along with Kazvare, author of Stay Woke, Kids! Download the image for printing here.

J.R. Thorp, author of Learwife, reveals why she chose to name her debut novel after the wife of Shakespeare’s famous King Lear.

Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death, reads an extract from Mrs Death’s story of The Red Tower at the Durham Book Festival.

I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here.

Learwife

J.R. Thorp

The cats began to walk on their hind legs, don fancy neckwear, and sport monocles and walking sticks – the Louis Wain cat had been born.

Louis Wain's Cats

Chris Beetles

I was a child and believed that if I stood alone, quiet enough, long enough beside my grandfather’s coffin, he would speak to me.

Look For Me and I'll Be Gone

John Edgar Wideman

Over the past half century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes. What’s wrong with that?

Major Labels

Kelefa Sanneh

When a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it.

The Book of Form and Emptiness

Ruth Ozeki

He’s not a copper who happens to be a man. He’s a man who happens to be a copper, and he carries that weight with him everywhere he goes.

The Dark Remains

Ian Rankin & William McIlvanney

This is a story about a band. A band that lived and flourished and then died its own natural death. At that point it should have disappeared from the pages of the history books for ever, and would have done so if an extraordinary miracle had not occurred and brought the Kamanga Kings back to life.

The Fugitives

Jamal Mahjoub