The most important skill a photographer can have is learning to see: the beautiful in the bland and the interesting in the immaterial.

Best-selling Kiwi crime writer Ben Sanders talks to Craig Sisterson about balancing study and writing, and evoking Auckland in his thrillers.

This outstanding transcription of extraordinary events carries a telling subtitle: "A Novel of a Life".

We still know little for sure about the prospects for intelligent fiction in a digital age. Yet most observers agree that the status of the professional "career novelist" may shift from that of a rare species to a deeply endangered one.

Lady Gaga's forthcoming pictorial book will include images of her in the shower.

New Zealand writer Tim Radford tells Stephen Jewell why his new book about roots defies genre and how reading Moby Dick can affect one’s sense of place.

Had Robert Hughes continued with his original aim of being an artist rather than becoming possibly the best-known art critic in the world it is a safe bet he would not have been a miniaturist.

When, in 1946, Bobby Troup wrote what became his classic song, Route 66, he could hardly have anticipated how popular it would become.

Geraldine Brooks very nearly missed the inspiration for her latest novel, this month's feature book Caleb's Crossing.

Tim Carlsen is an Auckland actor who is performing in Silo Theatre's I Love You Bro, now playing at the Herald Theatre.

Aravind Adiga turns a mirror on Indian society, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

Vivienne Plumb's new collection of poetry - beautifully designed by poet and publisher Helen Rickerby - reminds me that poetry books can feel so good in the hand. Plumb's poems have a chance to breathe on the page.

Why, asks Barry Forshaw, are Scandinavian writers winning worldwide acclaim for their crime?

We had the world's politest fight over who got first dibs on the most promising of the new novels on our Fiction Fix hot list this month...

Sarajevo, in Bosnia, was the perfect city for a siege. Nestled in a valley surrounded by hills, the people below became easy targets.

Award-winning Sunday Times columnist Danny Danziger made the inspired decision not to write a book about British soldiers, but to let the soldiers tell their own stories.

Jeffery Deaver tells Stephen Jewell why the new Bond carries an iPhone.

Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff was researching a story about World War II when he came across an article in the Chicago Tribune from June 1945. He was stunned.