Rachel Johnson and Sean Michaels

Available for over a year

Sean Michaels won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. It's a fictional account of the relationship between the inventor of the theremin, Russian Lev Termen and the musician - and superb theremin player - Clara Rockmore. He talks to Mariella Frostrup about creating fiction from a historical figure. Also blurring the lines between fact and fiction are the novelists Rachel Johnson and Michelle Miller who have written books about worlds they know intimately - Notting Hill for Rachel and Wall Street for Michelle. They talk to Mariella about gathering material close to home. Literary critic Suzi Feay surveys a crop of novels which feature authors as characters - Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others have all been included in the pages of books recently. And we take a trip to Hastings to discover why budding authors are turning to art for inspiration.