Writers and Company CBC Arts & Entertainment

This week, American Canadian novelist Claire Messud. Throughout her career and in her new book, This Strange Eventful History, one of TIME’s most anticipated of 2024, Messud draws on her own family's history, especially that of her French Algerian father. In 2001 she spoke with Eleanor about her novel The Last Life, which traces three generations of a French Algerian family from the perspective of a teenage girl. To conclude the program, Messud reads a chapter from the novel.

In honour of the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Eleanor Wachtel revisits her 2005 conversation with one of his biographers, Nicholas Murray.

Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024 for her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. She spoke with Eleanor Wachtel, who chaired the International Booker Prize jury, in 2015 about The End of Days, an imaginative story that spans the 20th century through the eyes of a character who lives multiple versions of her life. Erpenbeck also reflects on her own childhood, growing up in a literary family in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, and the ways in which history, politics and her experience with personal and national transformations have inspired her work.

The British born author moved to New York in 2008 to write a book set in sixteenth-century India. But he was drawn to write about America, focusing on life in the city and the Mojave Desert in his two novels White Tears and Gods Without Men. Hari Kunzru spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2017 from New York

Jackie Kay’s adoption as a baby, and investigation into her birth parents — a Nigerian father and Scottish mother — give her an original take on Scotland and cultural identity. Jackie Kay talked about her uncomfortable discoveries upon meeting her birth parents, as well as her two books, Wish I Was Here and Darling: New and Selected Poems, when she met with Eleanor Wachtel at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh in 2007.

In 2004, just before she won the Scotiabank Giller Prize (for the second time) for her story collection, Runaway, Alice Munro met Eleanor Wachtel at a restaurant near the author's home to discuss her new book, her interest in writing about infidelity and sex and her life growing up in Wingham, Ontario. The acclaimed Canadian short story writer, and Canada's first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on May 13, 2024.