The Guardian Books Podcast

Thomas Keneally tells how he found a novel in a stash of nurses' journals, Sarah Wise on the ghosts of Victorian mental health and Brooke Magnanti on the Wellcome prize for medicine in literature

Novelist Kamila Shamsie takes her turn in A Room for London - a model boat on the top of the South Bank - and ruminates on Conrad, Virginia Woolf and the women adventurers of her own family

There's a huge appetite for reading biographies, and thousands are written each year. But is it still a relevant kind of writing? Three authors tell us their Life stories

We chart how maps have transformed the way we look at the world with Simon Garfield and Jerry Brotton

Hilary Mantel has taken the Man Booker prize for an historic second time with Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her 2009 winner on the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall

We harvest the best of this year's crop of celebrity memoirs, including rock'n'roll legends Pete Townshend and Neil Young, and hear from Forward-winning poet Jorie Graham

We investigate a waspish essay on crime writing from Agatha Christie, Attica Locke considers race and history in the American south and Tanya Byrne tells us about young readers who are turning to crime

Ahdaf Soueif, the latest writer to take up residence in A Room for London, muses on rivers, bridges and terminals as motifs in the history of oppression and resistance

Iain M Banks explains how his science fiction novel grew out of a quite different kind of story – and a misunderstanding of structuralism

David Cameron and Tilda Swinton are among the readers of a new online version of Moby Dick; poet and novelist Robert Graves' last years on Mallorca are recalled by his great nephew Simon Gough

Teju Cole, the latest writer to take up residence in A Room for London, remembers a dinner with the great grouchy outsider VS Naipaul

As JB Priestley's classic, English Journey, is republished, the comedian Roy Hudd and Priestley's son Tom celebrate his legacy, while the Spanish novelist Javier Marías tells us what it's like to become a classic

Claire Armitstead reviews the Man Booker shortlist with reporter Alison Flood and arts correspondent Mark Brown

Zadie Smith tells us how her latest novel, NW, made the return journey to north London, while James Meek investigates the science of Tolstoy

We discuss the longlist for the 2012 Guardian first book award, which mixes fiction and nonfiction with a poetry collection chosen by our readers