Over the last few years, the Guardian has profiled the most important and popular novelists, poets and playwrights working today. Now, for the first time, the very best of these profiles are collated in one book, accompanied by Eamonn McCabe's stunning portrait photographs. Writers profiled include Chiunua Achebe, Douglas Adams, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Anita Desai, Carlos Fuentes, Seamus Heaney, P. D. James, Doris Lessing, Czeslaw Milosz, V. S. Naipaul,W. G. Sebald, Gore Vidal and Irvine Welsh. The pairing of these distinguished figures with Maya Jaggi, Nicholas Wroe, James Wood, Roy Hattersley and Andrew O'Hagan (among others) makes Lives and Works a unique celebration of fine writers on fine writing.