Carl Shuker’s Ockham NZ Book Awards longlisted The Royal Free is an exuberant, dark, wildly entertaining novel about death and copy editing.

Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits imagines an unlikely Irish pair staging Antigone’s Medea in a quarry, and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the UK’s biggest humour writing prize.

Fellow Wodehouse Prize shortlistee Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time’s situationship between a Victorian polar explorer navigating 21st-century London and a modern-day civil servant was described by critics as “a delightfully audacious screwball comedy”.

Michele A'Court joins them to hear about what inspired their humorous novels in unlikely settings, what goes into crafting humour that connects with readers, and what it allows them to do as writers.