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.