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Novelist Nina Stibbe has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction for her novel ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’. The book is set in the relative technological dark ages of the 1980’s and Nina explains how her excellent memory for half-forgotten period details helps her to evoke the period so well. She also celebrates the magazine Woman’s Own as being a manual for how to grow up, and argues for the acceptability of mowing the lawn in flip flops

Hannah Sullivan won the TS Eliot Prize for her debut collection ‘Three Poems’, and Hannah explains how her choice of technology and font helped shape the book’s appearance. Hannah also studied the impact of the typewriter on fiction, and tells Ian why poets were hostile towards it, and how it became a tool for revision.

How do you write boredom without boring the reader? Novelist John Lanchester lets us in on some of the writing tips he used in order to entertain the reader with boredom in his new novel ‘The Wall’. He also reminds us that perhaps our most important technology is language, and celebrates the world-building skill of JRR Tolkein.

Comedian Rachel Parris explains that the best tool for re-writing a comedian has is the audience. She also gives us some tips on writing a good parody, before leading the audience in a sing-along as they help to objectify her ankles…