Writers and Company from CBC Radio CBC Radio

Writers & Company revisits Eleanor Wachtel’s 2012 conversation with one of England’s great novelists, Hilary Mantel, who died on Sept. 22, 2022. She was 70. Mantel was one of the few writers to win the Booker Prize twice — first in 2009 for Wolf Hall, and again in 2012 for its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. She talked to Eleanor Wachtel about historical fiction, power and violence, and her fascination with Thomas Cromwell, the man at the centre of her sensational Tudor England saga.

Described as “a literary and cultural sensation” by the Paris Review, and considered a favorite for the Nobel Prize, Javier Marias died on September 11th in Madrid, at the age of seventy. In 2017, Eleanor Wachtel joined Marias (at his book-filled Madrid apartment) to talk about his novel Thus Bad Begins, which draws on both his country's dark past and his own family history.

Writers&Company starts its new season from Lahore, Pakistan. Mohsin Hamid was named "one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers" by the New York Times, and with his fifth novel, The Last White Man, he lives up to his reputation. He speaks with Eleanor Wachtel about his writing and his exploration of themes of identity, anxiety and dislocation in the post-9/11 world.

Born in 1938 in Milan while her parents were enroute from Germany to the United States, Renata Adler grew up in America and became a renowned writer and critic. She spent thirty years as a staff writer for the New Yorker, under the legendary editor William Shawn. She talks with Eleanor Wachtel about that time, as well as language, writing and the current state of the media. This episode originally aired in 2001.

A crash course in civilization with the versatile and witty Clive James. Critic, novelist, essayist, memoirist, poet, TV host... as The New Yorker put it, "Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys." Clive James died in November 2019. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2008 about his book Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, an illuminating compendium of 20th century thinkers — with an urgent plea for humanism in the face of tyranny.

This week, Eleanor speaks with the acclaimed Iranian graphic artist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. Her memoir Persepolis was an international bestseller turned prize-winning feature film, recounting her childhood in Iran and adolescence in Europe before and after the Iranian Revolution. Satrapi was in Toronto for TIFF 2011 with her romantic film, Chicken with Plums.