Interviews with Authors & Illustrators

If you're looking for inspiration then you've come to the right place. Our friends over at Bloomsbury Publishing have been speaking to a number of their brilliant authors and illustrators, asking plenty of questions about the creative process and their publishing journey so far. Browse the interviews below:

Darrell Wakelam on Art Shaped

'Above all I wanted to make art more accessible: you don’t need to be able to draw to be an artist, and you don’t need fancy materials to be creative.'

Kevin Jared Hosein on Hungry Ghosts

'It is only my hope that readers will look at the Trinidad in the story as a civilisation that was never meant to be.'

Katya Balen on The Light in Everything

'I definitely wanted to avoid stereotypes, because I cannot stand the pigeon-holing of boys and girls and how they should and shouldn’t behave, and what they should and shouldn’t like.'

Samantha Shannon on A Day of Fallen Night

'It’s been empowering for me personally to write a world which is quite women-centric and where the male characters don’t disrespect women just for being women.'

Rosie Andrews on The Leviathan

'I think great historical fiction shows an empathetic insight into its time period.'

Meg Howrey on They're Going to Love You

'Naming characters is so tricky! It’s one of the first decisions you make in a novel, and although you can always change them later on, I hate doing that.'

James Runcie on Tell Me Good Things

'I then realised that writing was also an act of recall. I was using the process to retrieve memories that might have been lost had I not been writing.'

Alexandra Page and Penny Neville-Lee on Wishyouwas

'If I had a choice, I would write at the crack of dawn, with a steaming mug of tea beside me, in a warm shed at the bottom of a garden as the world is just waking up.'

Zoulfa Katouh on As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow

'Every single time I get a message from a reader who enjoyed it or is excited for it my heart swells and soon enough it’s going to float outside my body!'

Sara Ogilvie on illustrating The Zebra’s Great Escape

'Usually I do lots of rough sketches to find the right character. You get a feel for them when you read the story text over and over.'

Katherine Rundell on The Zebra’s Great Escape

'Where novels sprawl outside your imagination, a picture book can be held steady, so you can look at it from every angle, and bend it into shape.'

Pandora Sykes on What Writers Read

'My earliest memory is lying on my top bunk bed and telling my mum she didn’t need to read be a bedtime story anymore, that I wanted to read them myself.'

George Saunders on Liberation Day

'A short story’s whole function is to make us wonder more deeply.'

Laura Purcell on The Whispering Muse

'I don’t feel scared when I’m writing a book, because I know that I’m in control of what happens.'

Kamila Shamsie on Best of Friends

'When I write a novel all kinds of things that interest me go into it — it’s ultimately down to the readers, rather than me, to decide in which corners they want to shine the light of their attention.'