Tracy Chevalier has earned a place of distinction among historical fiction writers for her beautifully imagined, meticulously detailed novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring (1997), The Lady and the Unicorn (2003), and The Last Runaway (2013). Her latest novel, A Single Thread (Viking, Oct...

Describe your current job in one sentence.

I am the managing director and a founder of Nosy Crow, an independent, multi-award-winning publisher for children aged 0-12.

Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders.

One day not long ago in a college class I was teaching, some of my students couldn't find the page I was talking about in the reading. And it dawned on me: There was only one required text in the class, an anthology of writing about the natural world called "American Earth." And they were...

‘Sometimes I feel like I talk about these things too dramatically. I'm sure some writers might read this and go, "For f*** sake you just published a book. Get over yourself." But you have to understand - before, there was none of it, then everything changed...

It's changed my life, and...

In 1965 the eminent American science-fiction writer John W Campbell wrote an essay titled The Barbarians Within. In it, he recommended that "the barbarian" - and it was clear he meant African Americans - be injected with cocaine and heroin in order to be kept under control. It was a plan that,...