We had the same challenge
Some inspirations / remarks from our experience:
IMHO, the bias introduced by transforming verbatim speech to third person is much bigger than the one by asking questions during an interview. The first influences content, the second only topic (if done right). We had this same challenge in the Future Makers Nepal project. Then @Dipti_Sherchan pioneered a solution that consists of first-person speech for the answers of the interview, and first-person remarks and introduction by the interviewer, all combined into a nice narrative format. See the interviews in the Future Makers Nepal space done by Dipti and Annu from our team so far. Could fit for a book format as well.