I had read the quotes and looked at the statistics, but it wasn't until I started speaking to victims of domestic abuse and listened to heartbreaking tales of control and fear that I began to see a different picture.

Earlier this month, Elizabeth Day wrote an article for The Observer about reading stories aloud. She made the interesting point that audiobook downloa...

With an estimated 530,000 different books released per year in the UK and America alone, which of them make it past the panels of book awards - from t...

2012 was declared the year of the short story and back in March I wrote an article exploring the immediate repercussions of such a statement. Now, here in November, as the final days of the year come swift and cold, I thought it pertinent to inspect the year's legacy.

Fortunately, little by little, comics are creeping into national consciousness. It's accepted that the comic format can and regularly does have the same depth as a prose novel. Though tensions are still high in places, the graphic novel at least is broadly accepted as an equal citizen in the literary world.

Last year it was Libya. Today it's Syria. 20 years ago Bosnia and the break-up of Yugoslavia was the focus of human suffering through civil war -- and in between there's been Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Liberia, Chechenya and many others that never reach our television screens.

I was an early reader and by the age of 10 I had read every book in my local children's lending library in Liverpool, and was given a special dispensation by the head librarian to gain entry to the adult library. That love of books has stayed with me and sustained me right to the present day.

I started the book pre-disposed to hate it, and read it through a haze of increasing envy and rage. It was very good, and she probably wasn't in the year above at all, but had just spent more of her time writing, and less watching ANTM.

If the name David Frum is at all familiar to British ears, it is generally closely accompanied by "the man who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil'". This may be enough for some readers to dismiss anything he has to say as the work of a crypto-fascist, imperialist running dog, but they do so at their peril.

I have been fascinated with Marilyn Monroe since I read Fred Lawrence Guiles book about her at the age of 12. When the editor of High50 suggested this idea to me, it was a real pleasure and challenge to imagine how her life could have been if she had been saved that night.

Why did you write a novel about her? About Myra Hindley, a woman who killed children? It's the question I'm most frequently asked about my novel, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, and is both hard and easy to answer. The material was dark and disturbing, and many people can't understand why a writer would persevere with it. But that's the point. Unless we look, really look at the terrible things human beings do to each other, we have no chance of understanding how and why they happen.

Joy Stephens would appear to have everything to live for - she's a successful City lawyer, about to be made a partner at the age of 33 - but she is planning to commit suicide before the day is out.

I am just back from The Literary Consultancy's (TLC) http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk/ revolutionary Writing in a Digital Age conference. Organise...

How many of us have purchased a book because there's been a movie adaptation, or because it's synonymous with a television programme?

In 2009 I was asked to be one of the Orange Prize for Fiction judges. I loved it. Although my boyfriend groaned every time I opened another book, I revelled in it.

I have been a critic for much longer than I have been a poet. Being a writer is tough. In a world where everyone who owns a Macbook and lives near a coffee house is a novelist, getting your work recognised is difficult, having it appraised even harder.

In a borough as diverse as Hackney, you will never capture the area in its entirety, and this was never our intention. What the books is, is our version of our neighbourhood. What made it so special to create, was that we found we weren't the only people striving to mark what is going on here, and we certainly aren't the only ones interested in it.

Other than a fairly crucial commitment to brevity, what is it that makes a short story a short story? As the 2012 edition of the world's richest prize for the form comes to a conclusion, I spoke with this year's shortlist to get their own insights into the art and craft of writing short fiction.