How I Wrote This

Sheana Lambert has published two collections of short stories, The Falling Woman and Oh, my darling and two novels, RadianceandPetra and been nominated for literary prizes including  the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. A Canadian with German heritage, she talks about echoes from the past and how the artistic legacy of her great-grandfather, grandfather, mother - and aunt, an 80-year-old burlesque dancer who's been inducted into the Las Vegas Burlesque Hall of Fame - has left its mark on her.

While an activist in the Canadian Peace Movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Shaena met Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the Green Party in West Germany, and Petra’s lover, Gert Bastien, who accompanied her. After the shock of her death, Petra became the subject of Sheana’s second novel.

Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf, is the most recent collection of essays and short stories where you can find Shaena’s writing.  

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is hosted by Pamela Hensley and 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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Wiebke von Carolsfeld grew up in Berlin, studied book binding in Cologne, and apprenticed at the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witch shortly after they’d acquired the rights to The Satanic Verses. When she emigrated to Toronto, for language reasons, she shifted her aspirations to film. Her first project resulted in a nomination for Best Editing at the Genies for the film Eisenstein.  

Wiebke is one of only a handful of women in Canada who has directed three or more feature films. In 2002, she directed Marion Bridge, which starred Molly Parker and won Best First Canadian Feature at TIFF. She went on to direct Stay with Taylor Shilling and Aidan Quinn and The Saver, which won her a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2016 at the Canadian Screen Awards. The novel Claremont is Wiebke’s first book and it’s been optioned for a limited series on TV. She is currently at work on her next novel as well as the development of her next film, a thriller called Someone’s Daughter.

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is presented by KnockAbout Media. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Behzad Karim Khani is an author whose explosive debut novel Hund, Wulf, Schakal (Dog, Wolf, Jackal) tells a story of violence on the streets of Berlin, and the lives of two immigrant brothers from Iran. It’s a book that elicited rave reviews such as this one in the Suddeutschezeitung: “Sentences you’d want to frame…simply a great work of literature.”

Behzad was a boy in Tehran when the Iran / Iraq war ended. With his family, he left and settled in Germany where his ethnicity marked him as an outsider. He grew up fast, fell in with gangs, and nearly went to prison for trafficking drugs. Things got better only when he moved to Berlin, got a job at a famous techno club, and became manager of the upscale restaurant next door where they welcomed guests like Quinten Tarantino and Karl Langerfeld. Three years later he opened a bar of his own and began trying to write movie scripts. Eventually one the scripts turned into a novel and in 2022 he published Hund, Wolf, Schakal and won a nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann Award. In February, the book, which was adapted for the stage, premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theatre. 

Behzad’s recommended reads:

Heinrich Böll

Peter Weiss

Christian Kracht

How I Wrote This is presented by KnockAbout Media. 

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Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. She’s written four novels that have been translated into English, a memoir, several short stories, plays, and a few librettos, including the one she finished just before she spoke.

Jenny writes about growing up in East Berlin and how her experience of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) shaped her worldview. Her novel, The End of Days won the Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize while Go, Went, Gone, which prompted the critic James Wood to predict that she would one day win the Nobel Prize, won the Thomas Mann Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker International. Her latest novel, Kairos, is about a love affair that crumbles while the East itself falls apart.

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is presented by KnockAbout Media. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

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 presented by KnockAbout Media. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Jonathan Garfinkel (http://jonathan-garfinkel.com/) is a Canadian playwright, poet, essayist and novelist who got his start in theatre in Georgia in the early 2000s. His plays include The Trials of John Demjanjuk: 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, the play 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.

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 realized it had nevertheless affected her and influenced 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.

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 

Judith Hermann

Katja Oskamp

Dana Vowinckel

How I Wrote This is presented by KnockAbout Media. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

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.

An introduction to the new podcast about authors, their books, and the story behind their stories.

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Sponsored by DeStiil Booksellers

Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation