SJ: One way of putting it might be that we wanted a publishing house that put the book first and asked all the other questions about how you market it later. We wanted to be led by the love of the writing, rather than notions of how well it might sell. Or perhaps a better way of putting it might be that we hoped that if we loved a book ... click here to read more

JG: I’m interested in difficulty. If you have a friend that you go round and see once a month, and their life is always cakes and roses, their beautiful new child, and all the rest of it, eventually you get fed up [laughs], right fed up with them. What makes a good story is something to chew on ... click here to read more

DK: I would go so far as to say that if you ever feel you’re ‘describing’ something then you have clearly failed to manifest that something completely, and the reader is now listening to your description of something as opposed to coming into direct contact with the thing itself ... click here to read more

JK: I was already involved in my own work in my own way. The crucial thing for me was recognising kindred artists involved in identical, and related, issues, struggling with language as an effect of linguistic and cultural imperialism ... click here to read more

SK: Class is awkward for us all. I know a working-class writer who is doing publicly well but lives precariously still, who repeatedly has materially middle-class senior academics asking him to validate their working-class credentials ... click here to read more

AW: Then obviously you are going to have characters that you don’t agree with at all - bastards or insensitive psychos, but you still have to express their position. They will say stuff that you don’t agree with but that you might feel enlarges their character on the page ... click here to read more