The winner of the Guardian first book award will be announced this Wednesday, so with only a couple of days to go, the Guardian presents the five authors lining up on the 2010 shortlist.

We find Alexandra Harris, shortlisted for Romantic Moderns, in Cookham on the trail of Stanley Spencer. There she tells Claire Armitstead why Modernists in England found themselves returning to landscapes and traditions they had left behind. Next Hadley Freeman talks to Maile Chapman about her novel, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, and explains how it came out of a desire to work on something really complex after finishing an MFA.

Nadifa Mohamed comes into the studio to explain to Claire Armitstead how Black Mamba Boy was based on the story of her father – though he might argue with some of the ways in which she's interfered. If the journalist Kathryn Schulz is right in Being Wrong, then perhaps we should move beyond our obsession with accuracy. She tells Richard Lea how error is an unavoidable part of our ability to be right about anything at all. Meanwhile Ned Beauman tells Claire Armitstead how he made the narrator of his novel, Boxer, Beetle, the opposite of a suave, Chandleresque private eye.

For the podcasts

The Guardian