Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won the Man Booker Prize.

“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.

Any period drama that crops up on Sunday nights is now automatically billed as a potential replacement for Downton Abbey. Any Human Heart has duly been described thus, but isn't. Converted into a four-part series from William Boyd's 2002 novel, with a screenplay by Boyd himself, it's the story of the writer Logan Mountstuart, whose long life spanned the major events of the 20th century while bouncing around between various continents and relationships.

The inaugural South Asian Literature Festival takes place in London over 10 days. It has drawn authors such as Amit Chaudhuri, Fatima Bhutto, Kenan Malik and Mohamed Hanif, as well as publishers, translators and artists (performance and graphic) connected with the region. Over and above events relating to tribal art, oral culture, travel writing, cultural offence and the literary divide (if such there be) between India and Pakistan, the festival will also feature the announcement of the shortlist for the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, a $50,000 award recognising "writers of any ethnicity writing about South Asia and its diasporas", the winner of which will be declared at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January. Theartsdesk speaks to prize-winning Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera, about the festival’s ambitions and the rude health of subcontinent literature.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist living in Delhi. His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), a 13-part story cycle in the tradition of Chaucer and Boccaccio, was translated into eight languages and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His follow-up, Solo, the story of the life and dreams of a blind 100-year-old Bulgarian chemist, won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. To mark the South Asian Literature Festival which continues in London until 31 October, we published this exclusive micro-non-fiction which charmingly illustrates through music the long history of cultural cross-fertilisation between East and West.

To paraphrase a cliché, it’s rare to leave a theatre humming the lighting. But here, Matthew Haskins’ lighting designs help make this production so powerful and evocative, whether projecting grotesque, distorted shadows on the back wall of Madeleine Boyd’s claustrophobic set, or illuminating characters’ subtle facial expressions. Dawn and dusk are both beautifully realised, and when we’re finally shown a brightly lit stage at the opera’s shocking close, you almost have to shield your eyes.

Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has reached phenomenon status: number 13 on a recent BBC Big Read competition, part of the school curriculum along with World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, three million copies sold worldwide. Its lyrical, descriptive writing, dense and subtle in detail, consistently moves people to tears.

I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and be brought back to the public consciousness again.

They say women past a certain age can’t get work in broadcasting. In more enlightened times, Mavis Nicholson was the first woman to interview on daytime television. She had given up a career in advertising, married, and had children by the time she started presenting in 1972. She was talent-spotted by Jeremy Isaacs on the dinner-party circuit, where her penchant for asking searching questions was deemed ideal for the new dawn of daytime. By 1997, when she last worked in television, she had interviewed David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams, Morecambe and Wise, Liberace and Maya Angelou, who saw her grilling John Cleese on TV and became a friend.

Could Peter Carey possibly become the first author to win the Booker three times? Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) both previously won him the most prestigious and hotly contended literary gong this side of the Atlantic (and south of Stockholm). The judges, led by Andrew Motion, have whittled the long list of 13 down to the final half-dozen, and Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is among them.