Writers and Company CBC Arts & Entertainment
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- Arts
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CBC Radio's Writers and Company offers an opportunity to explore in depth the lives, thoughts and works of remarkable writers from around the world. Hosted by Eleanor Wachtel.
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How Hisham Matar's writing reflects life under dictatorship and the pain of his father's abduction
This week, two conversations with the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return. In 2011, Libyan British author Hisham Matar spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his childhood living under Gadhafi’s dictatorship and the search for his father, a political dissident who was imprisoned. Then, from 2020, Matar reflects on his memoir The Return and his book A Month in Siena, which explores the relationship between history, art and grief. Please note: this episode contains difficult subject matter.
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Irish writers Michael Collins, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain reflect on home and away
This week on Writers and Company from the Archives, Irish authors Michael Collins, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain. They spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2003 onstage at the Victoria Literary Arts Festival.
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Catherine Lacey imagines a character without race or gender in her novel, Pew
The American novelist and short story writer talked to Eleanor Wachtel about growing up in Mississippi and her novel, Pew, which follows a mysterious stranger who makes a big impact on a small town in the American South. This interview originally aired February 28, 2021.
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Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence
This week, two conversations with Martin Amis, one of England’s most engaged and provocative writers. In 2014, Amis spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his novel The Zone of Interest, which focuses on the Holocaust from a different angle. Its screen adaptation is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. Followed by a conversation from 2019 about the Italian Jewish chemist, Holocaust survivor and writer, Primo Levi — whose work greatly inspired Amis’s writing — featuring Levi's biographer Ian Thomson. Please note: this episode contains difficult subject matter and discussion of suicide.
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James McBride on the complicated history of race in the United States
American novelist and musician James McBride is best known for his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water – about his immigrant Jewish mother and Black American father. In 2013, McBride won the National Book Award for his novel The Good Lord Bird - an irreverent portrayal of abolitionist John Brown. Eleanor Wachtel’s conversation with James McBride about these two books, and his life, first aired in 2014.
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How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother
This week on Writers and Company from the Archives, Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar and librettist, Anne Carson. The author of Autobiography of Red and its sequel Red Doc> is also the first and only two-time winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry. She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2011 about her book Nox — an elegy to her brother and a moving reflection on absence
Customer Reviews
BEST PODCAST EVER
Dear Ms. Wachtel,
It was upsetting to hear you are ending your podcast—-selfishly I wish you would continue doing it forever. There is no podcast I look forward to more—-I know it will be the most interesting, intelligent and enlightening hour of the week, without equal. As I am not a writer I do not have the words to adequately and appropriately thank you—-for an hour of bliss each week, for introducing me to authors I would otherwise never have known of—-many many thanks. You will be greatly missed. I can hope you write several volumes of memoirs !
No equal among author interviewers
An incredibly prepared and thoughtful interviewer of authors . Superior to all other book podcasts
The best
Eleanor Wachtel is one of the best interviewers in the world.