In 2016, French-Moroccan novelist Leila Slimani won the Prix Goncourt for her provocative thriller, The Perfect Nanny, which was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and is currently being adapted into a limited series starring Nicole Kidman. Slimani's 2020 novel, In the Country of Others, was the first of a planned trilogy – an intergenerational family saga set in Morocco after the Second World War. The forthcoming second volume, Watch Us Dance, takes place during the late 1960s and early '70s, a time when political repression and social optimism were coming head to head.

One of the world's most celebrated writers, Michael Ondaatje is the author of such acclaimed works as Running in the Family, Anil's Ghost, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, which won the 2018 Golden Man Booker Prize, named the best novel of the Booker's 50-year history. His writing, both poetry and prose, is often rooted in history – from Toronto in the early 1900s, to North Africa during the Second World War, to Ondaatje's childhood in Sri Lanka. He recently won the Grand Prix for lifetime achievement from Montreal's Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival.

Called "a poet of ecstatic revelation," U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón brings an observant eye and sense of wonder to all her work – from 2015's Bright Dead Things, to her acclaimed 2018 collection, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Limón's latest book, The Hurting Kind, is a finalist for the $130,000 Griffin Poetry Prize. The winner will be announced at a live event, complete with readings, on Wednesday June 7 at Koerner Hall in Toronto.

One of Britain's foremost travel writers, Sara Wheeler has written bestselling books and biographies about the polar region and its famous expeditions, as well as the United States, Chile, Russia and Greece. Now, in Glowing Still: A Woman's Life on the Road, Wheeler turns the lens on herself, considering a life spent on the road and writing in what has historically been a male-dominated genre. Part memoir, part travelogue, Glowing Still spans seven continents and has been described as "funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel."

Daniel Barenboim has been conductor of the Orchestra of Paris and musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Berlin State Opera, a position he held for three decades. Along with the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, Barenboim created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from the Middle East, especially Israel and the Arab world. Speaking to Eleanor Wachtel from Milan in 2008, he talked about the orchestra's historic 2005 concert in Ramallah, growing up on Bach and the meaning of music in his life. This episode originally aired on Wachtel on the Arts on IDEAS in 2008.

From Belgrade and London, the remarkable novelist, poet and memoirist, Vesna Goldsworthy. She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2019 about her novel Monsieur Ka, an ingenious re-working of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina — picking up where his story left off. Set in post-war London and focusing on the life of Anna's abandoned son, it’s an entertaining and affecting story about identity, exile and fiction.

Author of the powerful and poetic Grief is the Thing With Feathers, the best-selling British novelist talks with Eleanor Wachtel about his new novel, Shy, and his original imaginings of the natural world

On May 4, the winner of the inaugural US$150,000 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, which celebrates the work of Canadian and American women and non-binary writers, will be announced. In honour of the prize, Writers & Company is airing Eleanor Wachtel's last conversation with Shields, recorded at her home in Victoria in 2002. Shields died the following year. She was the author of more than 20 books including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries, The Republic of Love and Swann: A Mystery. Her last novel, Unless, tells the story of a writer struggling with the loss of her daughter, who's chosen to live on a downtown street corner with a cardboard sign fixed to her that reads "Goodness." *This episode originally aired on July 17, 2003.

In Diary of an Invasion, bestselling Ukrainian novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov documents daily life during the first year of Russia's war, fusing the personal, historical and political. Known for novels that are pointed yet playful, his most recent, Grey Bees, explores the 2014 conflict and its aftermath in eastern Ukraine through the eyes of a beekeeper living in the crosshairs. It won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award for translation. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, an earlier title now out in English translation, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

One of the most brilliant and influential writers of his generation, Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker, host of the Revisionist History podcast and author of many bestselling books, including The Tipping Point, Blink and Talking to Strangers. In 2012, Gladwell spoke to Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Toronto Reference Library as part of Jamaica 50, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence. *This episode originally aired June 10, 2012.