Poets & Writers Theater

“I wanted to write something that dealt with Brexit and our relation to Europe, but in a very oblique way.” In this Waterstones interview, English author Alan Hollinghurst talks about the challenges in developing the gay, biracial protagonist in his latest novel, Our Evenings (Random House, 2024), and reflects on Britain’s changing nature across the book’s half century of time.

In this interview, Ferdia Lennon talks about his Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize–winning novel, Glorious Exploits (Henry Holt, 2024), which opens in Sicily in 412 BCE with two characters hatching a plan to direct a production of Euripides’s Medea.

“I wanted to try and write something more fun and more upbeat.” In this Waterstones interview, Alex Michaelides talks about the spontaneous and playful experience of writing his latest novel, The Fury (Celadon, 2024), and how both his upbringing in Cyprus and career in Hollywood shaped his thrilling story.

At the Waterstones bookshop in London, Brandon Taylor talks about three books by authors he admires that inspired the writing of his latest novel, The Late Americans, published in June in the U.K. by Jonathan Cape. “The Late Americans is full of strange, difficult relationships and fraught dynamics with respect to sex and class, and to my mind, nobody does that better than Mary Gaitskill,” says Taylor.

In this Waterstones video, BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones interviews Hanya Yanagihara and the cast of the stage adaptation of her novel A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015), directed by Ivo Van Hove.

In this Waterstones video, CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays (Doubleday, 2022), talks about the books that have inspired them as a writer, which include Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward; I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins; and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

In this Waterstones video, Sloane Crosley speaks about her second novel, Cult Classic (MCD, 2022), and offers her book recommendations, which include All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews and Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark. For more from Crosley, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

“It’s not all fun, you know, the usual terror of writing a book.” In this Waterstones interview, Colson Whitehead talks about his new novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021), and how he gave himself permission to write a heist story. The novel is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

“You don’t write a book for a market, a publisher, or an agent; you write it because your heart calls you to write it.” Tayari Jones speaks about her “most personal” novel Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books, 2011) and about what keeps her going as a writer in this Waterstones video.

In this Waterstones video, André Aciman introduces his latest novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), the sequel to his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, and shares three books from the shelves of the bookstore that have influenced his writing.

In this Waterstones video, Bernadine Evaristo introduces her novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, 2019), which she describes as “fusion fiction” and a “celebration of Black womanhood,” and the books that influenced her as a young writer. Evaristo won the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other, sharing the prize with Margaret Atwood for The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).

“I’m hoping that it makes the reader scared in their own particular way.” Sarah Perry talks with Will Rycroft at Waterstones about her third novel, Melmoth (Custom House, 2018), and its connections to fear, politics, and Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

“What I’m often writing about is the sense of disappointment between how one wishes one would be and how one really is.” A. M. Homes speaks about her new story collection, Days of Awe (Viking, 2018), for Waterstones in London. Homes reads an excerpt from the book in the twentieth episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.

“A book to me is an escape into a different world.” For National Book Lovers Day, here are some booksellers from Waterstones in the U.K. expressing their love of books.

“Books come when they come,” says Bret Easton Ellis about The Shards (Knopf, 2023), his first novel in thirteen years, in this Waterstones podcast interview discussing metafiction and teenage angst.