How I Wrote This Knockabout Media

Andrea Wulf talks about gardens as windows into the politics, culture and science of a nation, why Alexander von Humboldt’s name belongs alongside Darwin, Einstein, and Newton; and how a group of young Germans in the small town of Jena introduced Romanticism and changed the world as we know it.
Andrea is an historian who was born in India, grew up in Germany, and now lives in the UK. In London, where - for the first time - she was exposed to the English obsession with gardening, her response was to co-write a book about it. Twenty years later, she’d tackled nature, astronomy, exploration, and 18th century philosophy.
Her books include This Other Eden, The Brother Gardeners, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, The Invention of Nature, and Magnificent Rebels. She is a winner of the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Award, and many other international awards. 
Andrea’s recommended reads:
Juli ZehStefan Zweig
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media. 
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join us next week for a conversation with historian ANDREA WULF, author of This Other Eden, The Brother Gardeners, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, The Invention of Nature, and Magnificent Rebels. She is a winner of the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Award, and many other international awards. 


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Garfinkel is a Canadian playwright, poet, and novelist who lives in Berlin. He got his start in theatre in Georgia in the early 2000s under the tutelage of Paul Thompson . His plays include The Trials of John Demjhanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret, the controversial show about a man accused of being Ivan the Terrible; House of Many Tongues, which won him an nomination for a Governor Generals’ award, about the residents of a house in Gaza shared by an Israeli and a Palestinian; and Cockroach, adapted from the novel by Rawi Hage. Jonathan has also published essays, poetry, a memoir, and in 2023, his debut novel, In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark. 
Jonathan’s recommended reads:
Nicholson Baker
Jenny Erpenbeck
Tilman Rammstedt
Nino Haratischwili
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media. 
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ivana Sajko is a Croatian artist whose work crosses from literature to dance, theatre to music and experimental performance. Despite coming of age during Croatia’s War of Independence, she rejected the impulse to write about it. Later, she realised it had nevertheless affected her and influences everything she writes.
Ivana moved to Berlin in 2016 where she continued to write plays, teach, and perform on stage. She finished Love Novel, which was translated into English and published in Canada in February 2024 and tells the story of a young couple trapped in the economic realities of late capitalism. An artist and a scholar who can’t provide for themselves sink further into desperation as the electricity is cut off, the neighbours come knocking, and the baby won’t stop crying. Love Novel won the HKW Literaturpreis in German and was shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award in English. 
Ivana’s recommended reads:

Priya BasilClemens MeyerSivan Ben Yishai
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media. 
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julia Franck was born in 1970 in East Berlin in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), a part of Germany that, at the time, was behind the Iron Curtain. As a child, she fled with her mother to the West and lived for nine months in a refugee camp, where they were interrogated by agents of the secret police. Five years later, when she was just thirteen, she left her mother’s home and returned to Berlin, this time living on the Western side with friends. 
Julia is the daughter of an actress and granddaughter of a sculptor whose family history has provided the backdrop for some of her most powerful books. The Blind Side of the Heart (called the Blindness of the Heart in the US), tells the story of a woman who abandons her son on a railway platform in 1945 after surviving the horrors of the Second World War. It was a story based on her own father’s childhood, a man she only met at the age of fourteen. The novel won the German Book Prize, the highest honour for literature in Germany, and went on to sell over a million copies. Two more of her books have been translated into English: Back to Back, based on her uncle’s life at the time when the Berlin Wall was being built; and West, which was adapted for the screen.
Julia’s recommended reads:

Herta Müller Katja OskampJudith HermannDana Vowinckel
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media. 
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Literary podcast How I Wrote This returns for Season 2. Join host Pamela Hensley for eight incredible conversations with (mostly) Berlin-based writers who have also published books in English. They include: Julia Franck, Ivana Sajko, Jonathan Garfinkel, Wiebke von Carolsfeld, Andrea Wulf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Behzad Karim Khani, and Shaena Lambert. 
Season 2 premieres April 23, 2024 with new episodes dropping every Tuesday.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media. 
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.