David Astle describes the white noise in his head and how he turned that into a career constructing cryptic crosswords; James Bradley shares his considerable passion for Battlestar Galactica. Sophie Cunningham interviews Morris Gleitzman about his holocaust novels Once and Then and the dark side of writing for kids; Ciannon Cazaly writes on footy and the culture wars; Jane Gleeson-White enters the dream-like worlds of story-telling traditions in the Middle East and its incarnation on the web; Elizabeth Argall takes us behind the scenes of writing a comic; Anthony Burke ponders the relative weights of children's lives in Palestine and the west; With fiction by Caroline Lee, Stephen Orr, Jessica Au, Eleanor Whitworth, Andrew Humphries, Damon Young , Gina Flaxman and Sunil Badami.