‘Not one big name in Irish literature has even attempted to gauge the feelings on the street and engage with contemporary social realism without sentimentalising it’

Our Book Club author on Eimear McBride, Maud Gonne McBride, Elena Ferrante, Wide Sargasso Sea and why dead people, naturally, are her dream dinner party guests

‘My aim in Dublin Seven was to present a character whose very life and death is seen by society at large as not worth caring about: the young, working-class male’

‘I work as a cleaner in Trinity College and when I get to dust the bookshelves in the Old Library, it smells like musty heaven. I can’t imagine ever sniffing an ebook’

My novel was inspired by sharing an incredible true story with my then 10-year-old daughter when she refused her life-saving injections. She taught me about voice

The Norwegian bestselling author on being inspired by Dostoyevsky and Adrian Mole, and his very strong desire for fiction after five quite autobiographical novels

‘I don’t particularly like doing background research. I would love just to imagine everything. However, since I write about police work, I have to get the facts straight’

‘There is no better way to appreciate another culture or to begin to understand the lives of others than through a well-written novel’

AC/DC biographer Jesse Fink on the difficulties of telling the story of Angus, Malcolm and George Young

‘Read your first drafts out loud to yourself, as if you were giving a sermon – a great way to show up areas in need of improvement’

‘The truth isn’t to be found in books, not even good books, but in people who have a kind heart’

‘No matter what other books I write, that first one will always be very special to me’

‘I read Jaws and The Godfather back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be. Also, they both had dirty bits’

‘When I read Anaïs Nin’s exposing personal enquiries into emotion and excavations of the truth, it transformed my concept of the territory of the written word’

'What was the first book to make an impression on me? The Bible. I had nightmares for weeks'

‘When I was young I had a knack for reading things I didn’t really understand and being caught up in their slipstream. I read Brighton Rock when I was 12 or 13’

‘The majority of female mega-selling authors are all severly under-rated and dismissed as unimportant, purely because they write women’s fiction. It’s nuts’

Brought to Book Q&A: Author of The End of Days on the books and authors that have inspired her

Author from Equatorial Guinea on what he reads and how he writes

‘It is hard to ignore the purported abandonment of narrative artifice in favour of something resembling unflinching, quotidian honesty’

‘The first books of Sjöwall & Wahlöö told me that it was possible to write the sort of crime fiction that later became known as Nordic Noir’

‘I spend on average about five hours a day writing fiction. For me to then pick up a novel would be the equivalent of jogging all day and then going out for a jog to unwind’

Brought to Book Q&A: Scottish author of the Jefferson Winter thriller series on the influence of Stephen King and Thomas Harris

‘I would have loved to have read the Game of Thrones series when I was around 14 or so. I would have definitely thought they were the greatest books ever written’

‘McCartney said that when the melody for Yesterday came into his head, he had the suspicion it must exist already, and that he had subconsciously plagiarised it. I felt the same about the story Self-Assembly in my collection’

‘Brought to Book Q&A’: Teen fiction author and critic on writing the sort of books she would have liked to read

Brought to Book Q&A: Irish author and academic on how he writes and what he reads

‘Brought to Book’ Q&A: Australian author of Coal Creek and The Ancestor Game on the books that have inspired him

Brought to Book Q&A: Author of The Kind Worth Killing on Harry Potter, Lucky Jim and his other favourite reads

‘If you love research, then not only are you lucky, but your book is half written already’

Don’t join a writing group – unless Stephen King, Bret Easton Ellis, Gillian Flynn and Donna Tartt are in it. Join a reading group instead

Brought to Book Q&A: Author of The Judas Kiss and City of Dis on what he reads and how he writes

Brought to Book Q&A: Dublin novelist on learning empathy through reading, and the writers she’d bring to dinner

Brought to Book Q&A: Former Bafta CEO on her favourite authors and writing her own novels

Brought to Book Q&A: Author of ‘My Innocent Absence’ on the texts which inspired her during her nomadic life

Brought to Book Q&A: Norwegian author and pianist on where he writes and what he reads

Brought to Book Q&A: Greek novelist and poet on Emily Dickinson and Robert Mouzil

Brought to Book Q&A: English novelist and historian on inspiring novels and favourite words

‘I consider my life a journey in the magnificent, enchanted world of books’

‘I’ve read Proust four times and every time it felt like a major punctuation mark in my life’