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 Zeh
• Stefan 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

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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 Basil
• Clemens Meyer
• Sivan 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 Oskamp
• Judith Hermann
• Dana 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.

Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.

Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.

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H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature.

When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Quebec where he studied African American Literature, earning degrees from Concordia, McGill and Université de Montréal. He became a high school teacher then a professor before publishing his first novel, Spirits in the Dark. Nigel is the editor of Kola Magazine, host of the Lectures Logos reading series, has twice been shortlisted for the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, won the 2013 Universite Laval Homage aux Createurs, the 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, the 2021 QWF Judy Mappin Community Award, and in 2022 the Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize.

Throughout his career, Nigel has written about and supported the Black and gay communities in his adopted country. Learn more in our delightful conversation.

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Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art. 

Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translated into several languages, most recently Russian. In 2015, he published his first novel, Boo, about a boy in the afterlife and the following year was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Geneviève Pettersen’s novel La déesse des mouches à feu into The Goddess of Fireflies.

In this candid and highly personal conversation, Neil talks about his latest novel, Jones, the heartbreaking tale about a troubling childhood that he describes as 75% true.

Trigger warning: sexual abuse / suicide

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Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec.

Until the age of ten, Kim lived a relatively privileged life in Saigon. But when the war in Vietnam ended, the Communists took over and her family decided there was no alternative but to flee. They boarded a wooden boat and made it to Malaysia where they lived in a refugee camp before moving to Quebec.

Kim went on to study linguistics and law, opened a restaurant, and became one of Canada’s most beloved authors. Her debut novel, Ru, won many prizes and awards including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and Canada Reads, and was adapted to a film that premiered this September at TIFF. Ru was followed by three more novels, Man, Vi, and Em, as well as a children’s picture book, a cookbook, and contributions to non-fiction.

Hear Kim’s incredible story in this sweeping conversation that spans the years from her life in Vietnam up to the present day.

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Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country.

Just four years after moving to Quebec, Baharan published Prophetess and won the 2022 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In lyrical prose, she captures the story of a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime against her sister. The girl goes into shock, becomes mute, and develops strange physical reactions to men as she begins to recognize - then later act on - the oppression in this world.

Listen to find out more about Baharan’s journey and why she is writing her next book in French.

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