Saul Bellow

Barack Obama talks to New York Times chief book critic about role of literature and writing in his life, from helping him work out his own identity to connecting with people

Not since Lincoln has there been a president so fundamentally shaped by reading and writing as Barack Obama

Where to now after one of the most corrosive US presidential elections in history

The celebrated playwright was born 100 years ago today in Harlem, New York

Justin Cartwright’s new book starts off swooning over the idyllic side of South Africa before taking in the awful history of murder and massacre between Boers and Zulus

Eileen Battersby celebrates the work of the great American, Russian-inflected, Jewish writer, an undisputed master of language and characterisation

Despite access to revealing documents, the biography lacks real insight and is a dull, overlong account of the writer’s life

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

Martin Amis is a deeply moral writer with a Swiftian vigour. In his latest novel, ‘The Zone of Interest’, he returns to the story of the Nazi death camps

Sean Doran wants to make Happy Days a ‘destination festival’, turning Enniskillen, where the playwright and novelist went to school, into a Mecca for his fans

With the Dublin Writers Festival kicking off this week, here are 10 great books with writers as their subject

Munro’s genius is in the short story, and that is what makes her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature so exciting

Swedish Academy calls her a ’master of the contemporary short story’

Obituary: Elmore Leonard 1925-2013

Reviewed by Eileen Battersby

The American writer’s psychotherapist son has written a perceptive, honest – and angry – book about life with a literary giant