Volume 1, No. 1, February 2014

Welcome to the February 2014 issue of Writers in Conversation. This is our very first issue, and we are delighted to publish what promises to be an exciting and diverse journal, filling a much-needed gap. As the response to our call for papers showed, there are many writers out there keen to discuss their work with interviewers, and interviewers keen to share what they have learned. Writers in Conversation welcomes them heartily!

If anything unites the interviews in this initial issue, it is, paradoxically, diversity. The pieces reflect a transnational world of global writing, with the subjects residing in India, Australia, Canada, the USA and the UK; several of them live in countries other than the ones they were born in, or spend time in various locations on the globe. We are proud that this reflects the dominant strains of contemporary literature, as identified in the most recent Booker shortlist.

Rather than list all the interviews here, and what they are about, we would like you to read them and discover this for yourselves. We will simply say that, mirroring the variety of writers, there is a great diversity in the subject matter and themes discussed: approaches to writing, realism, feminist politics, fantasy. You will be introduced to writers of fiction, poetry, drama and history, and see how writers explore gender, transgender, race, politics and war. We have learned a great deal about contemporary writing in our work on these interviews, and we are sure you will too.

Enjoy!

From Volume 4, no. 1, February 2017 Writers in Conversation will be published in Open Journal Systems and this website will no longer be updated.