Meet the co-presenters

Alex Clark
Alex is a journalist and broadcaster regularly seen in the pages of The Guardian, Observer and Times Literary Supplement and heard on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Open Book. She’s also a former Man Booker and Orwell Prize judge. She says, I’ve been a voracious reader since I was a young child, haunting the local library whenever I could. I vividly remember falling in love with books by a whole range of women novelists from George Eliot to Iris Murdoch to Toni Morrison to Jilly Cooper (Octavia! Imogen! Harriet!) when I was a teenager. I’ve never really looked back and one of my main occupations is building new bookshelves. Among my favourite current writers are Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, Maggie Nelson and Rachel Cusk. And I adore thrillers.

Sara Collins
Sara is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, winner of the 2019 Costa First Novel Award. She’s also a literary critic and broadcaster for a variety of outlets. She says, Since I was a tiny bookworm desperate to return one stack to the library and check out another, I’ve loved nothing more than reading books and talking about them, so this gig really is a dream come true. I fell in love with gothic novels as a teenager, which proved useful when, decades later, I wrote my own! Anything that holds itself out as a complicated psychological thriller, or has everyone talking about its 'unlikeable protagonist', is an automatic buy for me. But I balance this out through a healthy obsession with chick lit.