Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life.

Sean emigrated from Scotland at the age of five, grew up in Ottawa, and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. While still a student, he created Said the Gramophone, an mp3 music blog that would later be rated by Time Magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world. After spending years on a novel that was never published, he wrote Us Conductors and in 2014 won the biggest literary prize in Canada. He claimed it was lucky and went on to write a novel about luck, The Wagers, while writing columns for the Guardian and The Globe and Mail and the occasional article for Rolling Stone.

Find out more in our conversation and learn about his latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born?, in which a poet collaborates with AI.

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Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation of America.

Mikhail was born in Leningrad in the ‘50s. The son of a prominent scientist, his application for leaving his country was refused and his education all but wasted when he quit his engineering job to become a security guard at an amusement park. At the age of 30, he finally made it to the US just before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Despite his rudimentary English, he was accepted to study Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire and before long, his short stories were published in literary journals and he assembled his first collection, Every Hunter Wants to Know. Today he is a professor at Concordia University and a contributor to magazines like the New Yorker. He is also a founder and Creative Director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program where friends such as George Saunders and Francine Prose have acted as faculty.

Listen to here to our lively and fascinating conversation.

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Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing.

Anita moved to Calgary in 1991 when her husband was pursuing a Master’s degree at the university. Already a journalist, she enrolled in a creative writing program and began the manuscript for the novel that became Tamarind Mem. Four years later she published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, which was a regional winner for the Commonwealth Prize, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and a contender for Canada Reads. Can you Hear the Nightbird Call and Tell it to the Trees were the two books that followed when she moved to Montreal.

Anita’s writing was recognized by the Writers’ Trust when she won the Marian Engel Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize administrators when she was asked to chair the jury in 2017. Listen to our delightful conversation here.

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Heather is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. In 2006 she published her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which critics called “hypnotic” and praised for depicting “the most sympathetic abusive father in literature”. It won the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Governor Generals’ Award, and when it won the Canada Reads competition in 2007, it catapulted Heather to literary stardom. She has since published The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, a collection of stories called Daydreams of Angels, and two more novels, The Lonely Hearts Hotel and When We Lost Our Heads.

In this entertaining conversation, learn more about Heather’s early life and a hint of what’s to come in her next novel, her first to depart from Montreal.

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

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Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

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