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FiveBooks Interviews
Former Children’s Laureate and award-winning author Michael Morpurgo is widely recognised as a master storyteller and has won numerous awards for his work, including the Smarties Book Prize, the Writer’s Guild Award and the Blue Peter Book Award for Private Peaceful. Michael and his wife Clare founded the charity Farms for City Children and live in Devon. His novel War Horse was made into a highly successful play by the National Theatre and is now in its second year in the West End.
Riz Khan hosts the Riz Khan Show, an interactive interview show on Al Jazeera English. He was a news anchor for CNN for many years and in 1996 he launched an interactive interview show on CNN called Q&A with Riz Khan. His guests have included former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela, and genomic scientist J Craig Venter. Khan also secured the world exclusive with Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf following his coup in October 1999. He talks to The Browser about enduring love.
Jeremy Mynott is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the former chief executive of Cambridge University Press. Throughout his career, he spent his hard-won leisure time pursuing his interest in birds in many parts of the world. He now lives in Suffolk, though he still makes regular excursions to watch birds in favourite places including the Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly, the Volga Delta and New York’s Central Park. He has devoted much thought to the place of birds in our lives and the reasons we react to them as we do, culminating in his book, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2009. He is currently translating Thucydides for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, and his next project will be an anthology of writings about birds in the ancient world.
James Twining began his career in the business world but recently switched to thriller writing and has been dubbed ‘a worthy successor to Forsyth, Follett and Higgins’. His first book, The Double Edge, came out in 2003, and his latest, The Geneva Deception, has just been published in the UK. All his books are set in the art world and feature historical events and genuine artefacts – which, he says, are essential devices for a successful thriller
Marina Hyde is a columnist for The Guardian, writing on politics, celebrity and sport. Her column “A peek at the diary of...”, a satirical look at the private thoughts of celebrities, brought a libel action by Elton John, who was told by the judge that ‘teasing’ does not constitute defamation. She is the author of two books on celebrity.
Joanna Kavenna is a novelist, travel writer, and reviewer. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge. Her first book, The Ice Museum, was about travelling in the North in search of the mythical land of Ultima Thule. Her first novel, Inglorious, won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Here she tells The Browser that the concept of parallel worlds is no more dubious than that of a single reality, and that this is something that writers have known for centuries.
Sheldon Solomon is a Professor of Psychology and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is probably best known for his development of TMT (Terror Management Theory – an investigation into how humans deal with their own awareness of mortality), as well as his numerous TV and film appearances. Professor Solomon is also the inventor of the “doughboy” – a roll of pizza dough stuffed with chicken, three different cheeses, and spices.
Stephen Bayley is one of the world’s best-known authorities on design, architecture and popular culture. Author, critic, columnist, curator, broadcaster and consultant, he was the founding director of London’s Design Museum.
Peter Lilley was Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1990-1992 and was Secretary of State for Social Security 1992-1997. He was Member of Parliament for St Albans from 1983-1997 and, following boundary changes in 1997, he became MP for Hitchin & Harpenden. He chaired the Globalisation and Global Poverty Policy Group, advising Bob Geldof, which reported in July 2007. He tells FiveBooks that Samuel Johnson, man of letters and author of the 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, was not a hard-hearted Tory caricature, but a champion of the poor and enslaved.
Calvin Trillin is an American journalist and humorist. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963 and has written 26 books. He has composed rhyming verses about the Bush administration and one of his novels, Tepper Isn’t Going Out, is devoted to the subject of street parking in New York City.