Virginie Despentes, 55, was born in Nancy, France, and lives between Paris and Barcelona. Her books include her 1993 debut, Baise-Moi, about two sex workers on a killing spree; the feminist manifesto King Kong Theory (2006), which discusses her gang-rape at the age of 17; and the bestselling Vernon Subutex trilogy, televised on Canal Plus in 2019. For the Times Literary Supplement, her writing is “intelligent, outspoken, witty, shocking, propulsive and streetwise”. In Despentes’s new novel, Dear Dickhead, an author, Oscar, becomes unlikely penpals with an actor, Rebecca, after he insults her looks on Instagram while facing allegations of sexual misconduct from a young colleague.

What led you to write a #MeToo novel set in French publishing?
I saw it as being more about addiction. In France there wasn’t really any book industry #MeToo moment, but I was interested in Oscar because we have the same background, which is to say he wasn’t raised to be a writer who has a little bit of power. I wanted to think about what happens once we switch from not having much power to having a little bit and have to realise our situation has changed. I was interested in the moment at which you listen to what people are telling you. He thinks he’s the victim and then slowly understands what everyone’s talking about. Once you understand you’ve done some things wrong – and after a certain age most of us have – what do you do next? The book makes it obvious that I don’t have answers.

Does having answers interest you less now than when you began writing?
Something I understood with time – more as a reader than a writer – is that novels are a great space to not be sure about things. I was interested in writing a three-way conversation where you can’t choose between different versions of events, and don’t have to. I wanted to have Zoé [Oscar’s accuser] talking and I was interested in Oscar’s point of view, but also I wanted someone my age like Rebecca, who is less sure about all this frenzy about being a good person.

Did readers in France think the novel minimised male violence?
It went both ways. A lot of readers were understanding of what I was trying to do, but for some, it wasn’t radical enough, especially because I’m the author of King Kong Theory. Some people thought I was too nice with the aggressors. Shall we kill all men? I’m not absolutely against the idea, but it’s very difficult to do [laughs]. #MeToo let us see that there’s a massive problem, but where do we go from there?

What made you centre the action on two addicts?
I struggled with drugs all my life. Well, no, I enjoyed drugs… and then I was, like, 30 years old and started to really struggle. I wanted to write about it, but then I read an essay by Leslie Jamison about alcohol, which I thought was so brilliant and so close to what I wanted to do that I dropped the project. All of a sudden I thought, it won’t be an essay, it’ll be another novel where everything goes in.

Have you mellowed as a writer since Baise-Moi?
Yes. I’m very OK with not being able to write Baise-Moi now. I don’t think it’s possible to be my age and write from that perspective of anger. I wasn’t writing it from a very good place; now, if I met now a young girl like I was when I was 23, I’d try to take care of her. I loved being that person, but it was tough. The idea of taking care of myself came to me very late in life: good for me that I’ve mellowed. The world around me hasn’t mellowed at all. When I was writing [Dear Dickhead], the Ukraine war had just begun and it felt like there was more sadness than ever. For the first time I thought, I’m going to write a novel that makes you feel better – not that it’s always funny. I never thought I’d write a feelgood novel but people didn’t need something that breaks them down even more.

When did you first have the impulse to write?
I was 17, living alone in a new city where I didn’t know anyone, when I read Bukowski and thought, I’m going to write. He conveyed the idea that you can be a drunk working for the post office – which was me at that time – and write first-hand impressions of money, sex, alcohol and the city without agreement from the bourgeoisie. Thirty years later, I don’t read him with the same eye – the misogyny, the proletarian anger that can lead to the extreme right – but there was no bullshit and a lot of tenderness for the reader, like he was an older brother very close to me. I’d always been a big reader but he was the first writer who made me feel I’d met someone from my family.

What have you enjoyed reading lately?
As a reader, I need relief; we deserve it. That is why I love this American novel I’m reading, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow [by Gabrielle Zevin], which is brilliant. I also love the Madrid writer Alana S Portero. Mariana Enriquez, from Argentina, is to me the most interesting writer now: fantastical, gothic, strange, amazing.

Where do you prefer to work, Paris or Barcelona?
Paris is a difficult city for me to write in, because there are so many people for me to see, but it’s a good city in which to be a writer because books are still very important in France and that’s very motivating. And I like French writers – some of us really are arseholes, but we’re interesting arseholes! But for actually writing, I’m very much at ease in Barcelona. I have time, space, light and can walk. Generally I’m writing here, not Paris.

So what does a typical writing day look like for you?
Most of the time I’m struggling to write. I fail and end up doing something else – but all of a sudden, I have a book.

Ferdia Lennon, 36, was born and raised in Dublin. His first novel, Glorious Exploits, set in ancient Sicily, was the winner of this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize. It follows two jobless potters who decide to co-direct a play performed by Athenian prisoners of war. The New York Times called it “a comic riff on Greek tragedy, with an Irish accent”; for Roddy Doyle, it’s a tale of “modern-day Dubliners living among ancient Greeks”. Lennon spoke from his home in Norwich.

Tell us where this novel began.
I’ve been fascinated by ancient Greece since I was a kid. Then I read History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, a chronicle of the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta, which spilled out across the Mediterranean world. Athens launched this unprovoked invasion of Sicily, primarily against Syracuse, the main power. They thought: “We’ll be done in a few months and it’ll help us win in Greece.” It ends up with thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. I knew I wanted to write about that, but didn’t yet know my angle. Then a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides, the most popular dramatist amongst the Sicilians. I thought, OK, that’s my story: who were these Syracusans who left Athenian prisoners to die in this open-air pit, yet were so fascinated by their drama that they’re willing to save them in exchange for these precious lines?

What led you to centre the action on two unemployed friends?
Some of my favourite books and films are about friendship: Don Quixote, Withnail & I… Starving Athenians in a quarry in 412BCE is completely beyond the pale of what people are familiar with, but you can ground it in a friendship that people will understand. Most people have experienced that sense of their life not necessarily going quite the way that they’d hoped, some unrealised or unfulfilled ambitions.

Why did you write it in a Dublin voice?
Why not? I’m not going to write in an ancient Greek or fifth-century BC Syracusan dialect. There’s always a decision about which version of English to use. At first I was thinking: this is coming out quite Irish, do I pull back or double down? For me, it made sense to double down. I was tired of ancient Greek or Roman characters sounding as if they’ve stepped out of a Merchant Ivory production. Sicily had been colonised by mainland Greece: it made sense to me that the Greek they speak would be a bit different, the way Hiberno-English is a bit different. And Syracuse is the biggest city in Sicily, so the Dublin voice made sense. The Greek world wasn’t a monoculture: you’ve got different dialects, different classes, immigration, a massive slave trade. The language was a way to try to capture some of that difference.

Have you ever been involved in theatre?
No, my only performance has been as Frankenstein in a London Dungeon knock-off – I lasted about a couple of hours! I lived in Paris for a while and had friends who ran an amateur theatre group. I’d watch their rehearsals but never actually acted myself. I love cinema, though. As a kid my older brother was really into films, so we just had exposure to things you wouldn’t normally see at a young age: Kubrick, Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, who I love. Watching spaghetti westerns helped me indirectly with this book.

How did you first get interested in history?
I think I just liked good stories. Early on at school we had this textbook called Footprints and the interesting thing was that the early sections were versions of Irish myths and then as it went on it became straight-up history. It didn’t differentiate between them: like, chapter one was about Cú Chulainn, who’s one of the key Irish mythic heroes, then chapter 10 was about Kennedy! But maybe at some level that made a link between myth and narrative and history.

How do you explain the current wave of successful Irish novelists?
I remember that when I was a student, James Joyce’s house was five minutes up the road: just seeing that plaque, there’s something nice about having that literary history celebrated around you. On a practical level, the structures in Ireland make it easier for writers. An Arts Council grant helped me write this book. I wasn’t in any way established, but you could submit a work in progress to a panel of your peers and if you’re lucky, you might get money that will give you a couple of months that could be the break. I feel part of the burgeoning moment in Irish literature has to do with the financial crash. A whole generation was devastated, in Ireland maybe more than most. There were no jobs, so you felt freer to do what you wanted, even if it made no money; I started writing in Granada [in Spain] while unemployed.

My earliest reading memory
Probably The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum, read to me when I was perhaps three. It is very different from the movie and so was my first introduction to distortions and improvements in screen adaptations, and buried treasure in original texts. The mouse queen in the book completely enchanted me and of course is nowhere in the film.

My favourite book growing up
Nine Days to Christmas by Marie Hall Ets and Aurora Labastida, a story of a star-shaped piñata that becomes an actual star in the sky. I suppose it’s about death and eternal life, and magic and grief. It felt powerfully, wonderfully sad to me, though the end involves a kind of resurrection which perhaps through my tears I wasn’t buying.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner. I read it when I was 13, so when it first came out. It was amazing and intimate, and took me into a world I knew nothing about yet by the end I felt very close to. Meriwether died less than a year ago, at the age of 100. I hope she made some money from that book. If it reached me way up in the Adirondacks, it must have reached a lot of people.

The writer who changed my mind
Hmmmm. Not sure. Janet Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman, about the Hughes estate and Sylvia Plath, offers much sympathy for Ted Hughes, which I didn’t have a lot of before. It doesn’t throw Plath under the bus but it almost perversely looks at Hughes through a sisterly eye.

The book or author I came back to
Alice Munro’s stories always reveal something additional that you’d forgotten or perhaps even missed the first time. Also all work that you read later is different because you, the older reader, are different.

The book I discovered later in life
This doesn’t really answer your question since, of course, I’ve yet to hit “later in life”. But there are sometimes books you have to take a couple of runs at in order for them to work their magic on you. Years ago Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was like that for me. And more recently, Jayne Anne Phillips’s The Night Watch. Both are magnificent novels. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is a little like that for me too. I often find Chekhov’s plays strange and elusive, and then suddenly one particular moment illumines them.

The book I am currently reading
I recently read Enter Ghost – an impressive novel by Isabella Hammad that uses a production of Hamlet to look at a few of the many things it means to be Palestinian. A film I saw recently, Ghostlight, used an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet as psychodrama to try to understand teen suicide. A father whose son has killed himself is drafted to play Romeo and we are made to see him entering this death-bent mindset in the Capulet tomb scene. Shakespeare used in unorthodox ways is always interesting to me. Totally to one side of that is Miranda July’s arguably misogynistic sex comedy All Fours. The only appealing or admirable characters are the men! Yet most of the nutty drama is happening with the flawed but interesting women: well, that’s what fiction is for – flawed but interesting women. I couldn’t put it down. It has a dash of Der Rosenkavalier in it, especially in its ending.

My comfort read
Cook books. I scarcely cook, but I love reading recipes and imagining the whole thing. A kitchen full of delicious smells. I would never read literature for comfort. I would read literature for transport and for meeting a few people I would never want to meet in real life.

It was the end of the 1990s, and I was in my 20s working as a legal academic at King’s College London, but I wasn’t in love with the law. I needed a change. During a sabbatical, I saw a newspaper advert for a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art. In a moment of madness I applied.

I arrived at the entrance interview, my hands swinging. Apparently, it was customary to offer a portfolio for scrutiny. Unfazed, I said I didn’t have one. Nor did I mention that Mrs Ali, my high school art teacher, expressly forbade me from pursuing the subject, citing a basic lack of talent. But she was 4,000 miles away in Trinidad, unable to stop me now. I told the interviewers I was enthusiastic. Would that be enough? I still don’t understand why, but they took a chance on me. I started a week later.

It was a baptism by fire, with long life-drawing sessions followed by group critiques. Every lunchtime I cried into my sandwich. My sketches were stick figures compared with the brilliantly rendered drawings my classmates produced. Mrs Ali was right: I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. But I’d already paid a couple of thousand in fees, so contracted with myself daily to show up just one more time. The days became weeks that morphed into months. Eventually, I was hooked.

I emerged from those intense months of immersion in art and its history convinced that this was my calling. That crazy decision made me quit my job. It took me back to university, only I was now a Goldsmiths College art undergrad. This was followed by a masters in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London. Oh, and somewhere along the line we had twin baby boys.

Safely ensconced in institutions of higher education, I acquired bits of art teaching and occasionally exhibited work. This mix of teaching, art practice and parenting felt brilliant. I wore black, dyed my hair rainbow colours and believed I was one of the cool kids. One look at my hubris and the universe doubled over laughing. Before I could turn around twice, the twins’ father decided city life was too confining. We had ties to Barbados, and with a heavy heart, I packed our life into boxes while grieving for the London art scene I was leaving behind.

This was the mid-2000s; Barbados’s art landscape has since been radically transformed, but when I arrived I didn’t find an obvious tribe. Artists were mainly producing large, colourful narrative paintings. I’m a conceptual artist with zero painting skills. Most of my time is spent on the idea. Typical of my work is a piece inspired by the capture of a sniper who plagued Washington DC. After the suspect was caught, the police spokesperson said: “We were looking for a white man in a white van. We found a black man in a blue car.” I programmed each sentence into a separate ticker tape. As they scrolled, the colours changed, so that you might see “We were looking for a white man in a black van” alongside “We found a blue man in a white car”. I never did collect that piece from the small gallery where it was exhibited.

My new island home was also tiny, a mere 14 by 21 miles. I was desperate to make work but didn’t know how. At a petrol station, I politely inquired if the manager would consider having me as an artist in residence. I would create art out of interactions with employees as well as the endless stream of customers. He watched me cut eye and muttered something about how he had never heard anything so stupid. I should pay for my gas and move on, please. I was holding up the line.

I had more success at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, which gave me an unpaid month-long residency. I was ecstatic. It meant I could roam the museum freely, interact with staff, archives and exhibits and then produce work out of my reflections. Again, things have since improved there, but back then it struck me as a fossilised space. Displays appeared untouched for decades. Actual bookworms had munched through various archives, rendering them barely legible. Decay was everywhere.

I took a deep breath and did the only thing all my years of art school training suggested. I set to work sweeping the floors, careful to store the dust collected from each room in separate glass jars. I then cleaned cabinets, storing and labelling the detritus. Since the bookworms had bitten through the archives, I knew I had to bite back. I etched the patterns left behind by the worms on to prepared metal plates, which were then dipped in an acid bath. The acid “bites” into the metal plate, etching the drawing into it. The plate is then loaded with ink and the pattern pressed on to paper.

My residency exhibition consisted of a makeshift apothecary, filled with the jars of collected dust, framed etchings of bookworm drawings, an installation of fabricated archives and a sound piece listing donations made to the museum over the years. A good 50 friends and museum well-wishers showed up. I was not asked back.

A little disheartened, I dug deep for other art strategies. There was the time I set out on what the French theorist Guy Debord called a dérive, an unplanned walk through an urban landscape where one observes the everyday anew. The island’s lack of pavements means that no one walks. So I got in my car, chose a random vehicle, and drove behind it for a couple of hours. The day ended when the driver pulled over, got out of the car and glared at me menacingly.

Then I followed up a series of classified ads, making work out of the things offered. I bought oils with names like Boss Fix, Court Case and Jezebel Spiritual, repurposed them with my own written spells and offered magic potions for sale. I didn’t get any takers.

Gradually, I found my best interrogation of this new home was not from making objects but through words. For a couple of years I produced a weekly blog, Notes from a Small Rock. Published every Friday at 10am, it had quite a following on the island of 270,000. One day, after a meal out with friends, I started a short story inspired by a dessert on the menu called Death by Chocolate. I could feel the play of art and the discipline of law finally combining. A voice that had been lurking somewhere inside poured on to the page. I submitted it to some competitions and won two awards.

Then I moved on to a novel, and that got published after a seven-way auction. It was the beginning of a journey to full-time writing. But I continue to be inspired by art and probably spend most of my free time in galleries, rarely leaving without a yearning to make work. I still keep a tiny sketchbook and pencils in my backpack. At the Hay festival recently I got an idea inspired by the variety of bookish tote bags everywhere.

But hard choices must be made, and the manuscript of my next novel begs for attention. I open my laptop and begin reading the draft, knowing I’m in a space where what I do feeds my intellect and nourishes my soul. I’m finally home.

“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.

“Something enormous comes your way, and you have to go with it. And I’ve gone with it, and I’ve done 200 interviews. It’s hard to process that, and I do worry, who will I be after this? When I come back to reality, when my feet touch the ground, what kind of writer am I going to be?

Lynch won the 2023 Booker prize for Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny, praised for capturing “the social and political anxieties of our current moment”.

The day after winning, he did 23 interviews, with two 10-minute breaks. “I’m a meditator, and I said, ‘I need to meditate, so let me go into a room,’ and I meditate for 10 minutes and they literally grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back out.” The Booker prize staff told him he had appeared in 3,000 pieces of media around the world that day.

After the media “tornado” is over, he ultimately believes he will be the “same writer”, because his “authentic self” takes over when he is writing. “When I seize upon an idea, all I’m interested in is getting to the end line of truth, and I hope that’s where I go next,” he said.

Lynch’s win in November came days after the Dublin riots. At the time, he thought “this isn’t the book coming true”. But “at the same time, it is the start of a certain energy that I’ve been thinking a lot about”.

It is a “very dangerous thing to presume” that liberal democracy is going to remain. “Civilisation is such a thin veneer, and it’s so fragile.”

He said that while Prophet Song “can be read as a very political novel”, he is not a political novelist. “That is something that has arrived almost by accident. What I’m seeking is human truth.”

Lynch also said that he has been re-reading Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer “who has been banished. The problem with banished writers, the great dead white males, is that great writing still sits there, and it calls you back”.