Issue 1358

Like most events, this autumn’s literary festival are mainly taking place online. We round up the best of them and bring you a crop of author interviews in this week’s Big Issue North.

As he shifts Rebus out of his comfort zone, Ian Rankin says he didn’t intend to become a crime writer. Kevin Bourke asks how his retired detective would have coped with lockdown.

Oliver Jeffers’ sculptures of the Moon and the Earth gave his son a glimpse of humanity’s role in the universe. His new book What We’ll Build is a sort of information pack for his daughter. But the Belfast-born artist’s work across disciplines provokes as much of an emotional response from adults, writes Antonia Charlesworth.

We might question some of the methods social workers and psychologists used to treat child survivors of the Holocaust but their efforts were remarkable, according to historian and author Rebecca Clifford – and nowhere more so than in Windermere. She tells Saskia Murphy there are lessons in how we should look after child refugees today.

Elsewhere in the magazine Nick Hornby pens a letter to his younger self, Chris Frantz discusses his Talking Heads memoir, and there’s all our usual news, opinion and reviews.