Interviews: August 2011

Comic book supergod Grant Morrison tells us about his book, Supergods

Ben Myers, an already well-known music journalist for NME, The Quietus, Melody Maker and more, has courted controversy with his second novel, Richard - a fictionalised imagining of the final days of tragic Manic Street Preachers lyricist, Richey Edwards. What the controversy around the novel has missed seems to be the tenderness with which Myers treats his main protagonist. Obviously a fan of the man and the period, Myers paints Edwards as sensitive and passionate, almost as revered as a French philosopher. It's certainly a brave premise.

Amy Sackville has won this year's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her debut novel, The Still Point.

There's been a slew of great debut novels this year, but nothing sticks in your head more than a talking dog. Nothing gets your national pride tingling like a reimagining of Winston Churchill's time in parliament, and so, here we are, with Mr Chartwell, the first novel by Rebecca Hunt.

Bryan Talbot wrote the impeccable Alice in Sunderland. He has been at the forefront of British graphic fiction for years.

Dinaw Mengestu won the Guardian First Book Award in 2008 for his fractured, delicate book, Children of the Revolution.

The class of debut authors 2011 starts off with a bang- journalist Mirza Waheed has created a shocking, moving and intense book about Kashmir and its teenage boys.

Lee Rourke, the author of The Canal, talks Beckett, Americanisms and notepads.

Stuart Evers is a self-confessed book-obsessive. Hearing him talk passionately about everything from crime to short stories to football memoirs, you get a sense of how well read this man is, and not in a smug highbrow way - his tastes are varied. He has been a bookseller, editor, critic and now he is a writer.

This interview started out as a conversation with debut author Leo Benedictus but slowly became a meta-discussion of how the interviewer would eventually write him up.

That is to say, everything below is an accurate snippet of the author and his book.

But it is also all a lie.