Writers and Company

By CBC

What's Writers and Company about?

CBC Radio's Writers and Company offers an opportunity to explore in depth the lives, thoughts and works of remarkable writers from around the world. Hosted by Eleanor Wachtel.

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Writers and Company episodes:

04.14.2024
Alice Oswald on poetry, nature and the shedding of identity
To celebrate poetry month, a conversation with one of England’s greatest living poets, Alice Oswald. Winner of the 2017 international Griffin Poetry Prize for her book Falling Awake, Oswald's work explores the relationship between human life and the natural world....
04.07.2024
The beautiful, melancholy world of Anita Desai
This week on Writers and Company, Anita Desai — one of India's most celebrated and successful writers. Over the course of her career, which spans five decades, Desai has written several novels and has been nominated for the Booker Prize...
03.31.2024
James Runcie on the beauty, sorrow and genius of Johann Sebastian Bach
James Runcie's novel, The Great Passion, imagines a year in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, culminating with the first performance of his St. Matthew Passion in Leipzig, Germany during Easter 1727. Told through the eyes of a fictional, 13-year-old...
03.24.2024
How Hisham Matar's writing reflects life under dictatorship and the pain of his father's abduction
This week, two conversations with the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir The Return. In 2011, Libyan British author Hisham Matar spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his childhood living under Gadhafi’s dictatorship and the search for his father, a political...
03.17.2024
Irish writers Michael Collins, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain reflect on home and away
This week on Writers and Company from the Archives, Irish authors Michael Collins, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain. They spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2003 onstage at the Victoria Literary Arts Festival.
03.10.2024
Catherine Lacey imagines a character without race or gender in her novel, Pew
The American novelist and short story writer talked to Eleanor Wachtel about growing up in Mississippi and her novel, Pew, which follows a mysterious stranger who makes a big impact on a small town in the American South. This interview...
03.03.2024
Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence
This week, two conversations with Martin Amis, one of England’s most engaged and provocative writers. In 2014, Amis spoke with Eleanor Wachtel about his novel The Zone of Interest, which focuses on the Holocaust from a different angle. Its screen...
02.25.2024
James McBride on the complicated history of race in the United States
American novelist and musician James McBride is best known for his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water – about his immigrant Jewish mother and Black American father. In 2013, McBride won the National Book Award for his novel The Good...
02.18.2024
How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother
This week on Writers and Company from the Archives, Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar and librettist, Anne Carson. The author of Autobiography of Red and its sequel Red Doc> is also the first and only two-time winner of...
02.11.2024
Xiaolu Guo traces her unlikely journey from a rural Chinese fishing village to life in London as a writer
Novelist, memoirist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo discusses her memoir, Nine Continents, which traces her life from a Chinese fishing village to Beijing and England. It won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award. Guo spoke to Eleanor in 2018 about...
02.04.2024
The incomparable Philip Roth: looking back on his life in fiction
Looking back on Philip Roth, one of the most celebrated American writers, who died in 2018, aged 85. From Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint to The Plot Against America — Roth’s legacy lives on. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in...
01.28.2024
Alain Mabanckou on his profound connection to the Republic of the Congo
The celebrated Congolese-French writer joined Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Vancouver Writers Festival in 2016. Mabanckou's recent books are charming explorations of childhood, family and country. His memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire relates his experience of returning to his hometown...
01.21.2024
The enduring magic of The Little Prince: with Stacy Schiff, Mark Osborne and Éric Dupont
This week on Writers & Company from the archives, celebrating a classic that’s also one of the most translated books in the world: Le Petit Prince or The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Biographer Stacy Schiff, filmmaker Mark Osborne...
01.14.2024
Elizabeth Jane Howard looks back on learning, love and her marriage to Kingsley Amis
Best known for her Cazalet Chronicles and a dozen other books, English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard turned to her own life in her memoir, Slipstream. In the book, and in this conversation with Eleanor Wachtel from 2003, she reflects on...
01.07.2024
How fighting for Indigenous rights shaped Alexis Wright as a storyteller
Australia's most celebrated Indigenous author Alexis Wright spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2009 about her award-winning novel Carpentaria. Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her new novel, Praiseworthy, will be published in...
12.31.2023
Dionne Brand, Margaret Drabble, Deborah Eisenberg & Andrew O'Hagan reflect on life and writing
This week, to strike a celebratory note, an encore presentation of Writers & Company's 20th anniversary special with acclaimed writers Dionne Brand, Margaret Drabble, Deborah Eisenberg and Andrew O'Hagan. They joined host Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Toronto International Festival...
12.24.2023
Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney on the place of politics in poetry
Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, Irish poet Seamus Heaney died ten years ago when he was 74. Known for poems that engage with the immediacy of the natural world and its physicality, Heaney spoke to Eleanor Wachtel...
12.17.2023
How writing helped Lore Segal survive a traumatic wartime childhood
At 95, Lore Segal has been writing for almost sixty years. The author of Other People's Houses, Half the Kingdom and Shakespeare's Kitchen, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Segal's latest book is called Ladies' Lunch and Other...
12.10.2023
A virtuoso of the short story, Lydia Davis's work is surprising and memorable
Lydia Davis has been called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction." Her 2007 short story collection, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Davis's newest title, Our Strangers, contains 144 short...
12.03.2023
In her prizewinning fiction, Sigrid Nunez deals with life — and death — with empathy and wit
WARNING: This discussion deals with suicide. Sigrid Nunez's eighth title, The Friend, won the 2018 U.S. National Book Award. Hailed as "a subtle, unassuming masterpiece," it follows a woman grieving the death of her friend as she cares for his...
11.26.2023
Looking back at A.S. Byatt, the celebrated English novelist and imaginative intellectual
In honour of novelist and critic A.S. Byatt, who died on November 16, Writers & Company revisits her 2009 interview with Eleanor Wachtel, recorded live at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. Byatt was there to launch her...
11.19.2023
Nora Krug asks tough questions about her German family's wartime past
In 2019, Eleanor Wachtel spoke to German-American graphic artist Nora Krug about her award-winning illustrated memoir, Belonging. It's a powerful and compassionate investigation into Krug's family's involvement in the Second World War and the impact of history on successive generations....
11.12.2023
Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien on fictionalizing his war stories
WARNING: This discussion deals with suicide. In late 1994, Eleanor Wachtel spoke to award-winning author and Vietnam War veteran Tim O'Brien. He's the author of such acclaimed books as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried and In the Lake...
11.05.2023
Jesmyn Ward on exploring the stories of America's South
Jesmyn Ward's novel, Salvage the Bones, is an intimate and compelling look at Hurricane Katrina and the American South. It won the National Book award in 2011. Following the success of Salvage the Bones, Ward released her memoir, Men We...
10.29.2023
Jeanette Winterson brings humour and understanding to a fraught childhood
WARNING: This discussion deals with suicide. England's Jeanette Winterson reflects on her childhood and explores her search for love and belonging in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson is the author of the hit, semi-autobiographical novel,...
10.22.2023
How John Grisham turned his passion for justice into bestselling legal thrillers
John Grisham's novel The Reckoning re-imagines a story the author encountered more than 30 years ago about a murder in small-town Mississippi. It centres on Pete, a cotton farmer returning from the Second World War, and the mystery surrounding his...
10.15.2023
Viet Thanh Nguyen on redefining what it means to be a refugee
Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 novel, The Sympathizer, tells the story of a Communist Party spy who escapes Saigon and goes to California, where he leads a double life as an intimate of a former South Vietnamese general. It won the...
10.08.2023
Anne Enright on her Booker-winning novel, The Gathering, and how Canada helped make her a writer
The former inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, Anne Enright won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, which revolves around the tragic death of a young man inside a large family, told from the perspective of his...
10.01.2023
Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin on her legendary career and the power of storytelling
Acclaimed Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin has dedicated her life to telling the stories of Indigenous peoples. She's made more than 50 films with the National Film Board of Canada, including the landmark documentaries Christmas at Moose Factory, Incident at Restigouche...
09.24.2023
Chinese writer Yan Ge finds solace in creating literary worlds
Fiction writer Yan Ge is a literary sensation in China, where she was named one of her country's "future literary masters." Her novel, translated as Strange Beasts of China, is a mysterious, imaginative tale about mythological creatures who live alongside...
09.17.2023
Novelist Sebastian Barry explores the personal stories behind Ireland's political history
The former laureate for Irish fiction, Sebastian Barry writes richly invented stories inspired by people in his own family – from his grandfather in the 2014 novel, The Temporary Gentleman, to Days Without End about his grandfather's uncle. His latest...
09.10.2023
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland examines moral choice in an immoral world
Agnieszka Holland is perhaps best known for her films Europa Europa, Angry Harvest and In Darkness, as well as adaptations of The Secret Garden and Washington Square. Her latest film, Green Border, about the Syrian refugee crisis along Poland's border...
09.03.2023
Zadie Smith on writing, family and her addiction to reading
Eleanor Wachtel has spoken to the popular and critically acclaimed English writer Zadie Smith many times over the years, including in 2010 about her first non-fiction collection, Changing My Mind. It features essays about writers such as Franz Kafka, Vladimir...
08.27.2023
John le Carré on his legacy as a spy-turned-novelist
In this conversation from 2017, the master of the political thriller John le Carré spoke with Eleanor at his home in London about his novel A Legacy of Spies, which saw the return of his most famous character, the enigmatic...
08.20.2023
Oliver Sacks on how an unconventional childhood shaped his love of science
Known for his bestselling case studies The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and An Anthropologist on Mars, British author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was one of a kind. Infused with enthusiasm and compassion, his writing explored...
08.13.2023
Toni Morrison on family bonds, race and coping with personal tragedy
When Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the Swedish Academy praised her for giving "life to an essential aspect of American reality," in novels "characterized by visionary force and poetic import." In this 2012 conversation,...
08.06.2023
Acclaimed poet Mark Strand was known for meditative, spare verse that was anything but simple
One of the premier American poets of his generation, Mark Strand used precise, everyday language, humour and surreal imagery to describe the quiet anguish of life. A former poet laureate of the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for his...
07.30.2023
Julian Barnes on love, loss and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich
Eleanor Wachtel has spoken to the award-winning English writer Julian Barnes many times over the course of his lengthy career. In June 2016, he joined her onstage at the Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library to talk about...
07.23.2023
How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers
In a special conversation recorded in Toronto in 2002, Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantell, founders of Caedmon Records, a pioneer in commercial spoken word recordings. You'll hear the voices of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Dylan Thomas,...
07.16.2023
Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat on family, migration and the beauty of her home country, Haiti
Celebrated Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat speaks to Eleanor Wachtel about her moving memoir, Brother, I’m Dying. It tells the story of Danticat's family amid turbulent times, focusing on her father and his brother, the uncle who raised her in...
07.09.2023
Britain’s literary power couple Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd turn the lens on their own lives
In a rare joint conversation recorded onstage in Montreal in 2001, popular novelist Margaret Drabble and her husband, the influential biographer Michael Holroyd, spoke to Eleanor Wachtel about their once-secret marriage, and exploring their parents' stories through works of fiction...
07.02.2023
A family affair: remembering the personal side of Martin Amis and his father, Kingsley
Remembering the popular and provocative English writer, Martin Amis, who died in May 2023 at the age of 73. Son of acclaimed author Sir Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis is perhaps best known for his novels Money, London Fields and The...
06.25.2023
Celebrating Writers & Company: 33 years of exceptional interviews with the incomparable Eleanor Wachtel
For Writers & Company's final original episode, Eleanor Wachtel is interviewed on-stage by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current. She then speaks with American authors Brandon Taylor and Gary Shteyngart, and receives surprise greetings from the likes of...
06.18.2023
Leila Slimani fuses imagination and memory in novels inspired by her French Moroccan family
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...
06.11.2023
For prize-winning poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, every book is an act of discovery
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...
06.04.2023
US poet laureate Ada Limón celebrates nature, family and human connection in The Hurting Kind
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...
05.28.2023
From Antarctica to Zanzibar – Sara Wheeler on 40 years of adventure in her new book, Glowing Still
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...
05.21.2023
Maestro Daniel Barenboim on his life in music — and its role in bringing cultures together
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...
05.14.2023
Serbian British writer Vesna Goldsworthy on reimagining Anna Karenina
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....
05.07.2023
Max Porter blurs the line between dream and reality in his compelling, inventive 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

What's Writers and Company about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Writers and Company episodes:

Alice Oswald on poetry, nature and the shedding of identity

The beautiful, melancholy world of Anita Desai

James Runcie on the beauty, sorrow and genius of Johann Sebastian Bach

How Hisham Matar's writing reflects life under dictatorship and the pain of his father's abduction

Irish writers Michael Collins, Claire Keegan, Colum McCann and Nuala O'Faolain reflect on home and away

Catherine Lacey imagines a character without race or gender in her novel, Pew

Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence

James McBride on the complicated history of race in the United States

How writer and scholar Anne Carson used elegy to piece together fragments of her late brother

Xiaolu Guo traces her unlikely journey from a rural Chinese fishing village to life in London as a writer

The incomparable Philip Roth: looking back on his life in fiction

Alain Mabanckou on his profound connection to the Republic of the Congo

The enduring magic of The Little Prince: with Stacy Schiff, Mark Osborne and Éric Dupont

Elizabeth Jane Howard looks back on learning, love and her marriage to Kingsley Amis

How fighting for Indigenous rights shaped Alexis Wright as a storyteller

Dionne Brand, Margaret Drabble, Deborah Eisenberg & Andrew O'Hagan reflect on life and writing

Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney on the place of politics in poetry

How writing helped Lore Segal survive a traumatic wartime childhood

A virtuoso of the short story, Lydia Davis's work is surprising and memorable

In her prizewinning fiction, Sigrid Nunez deals with life — and death — with empathy and wit

Looking back at A.S. Byatt, the celebrated English novelist and imaginative intellectual

Nora Krug asks tough questions about her German family's wartime past

Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien on fictionalizing his war stories

Jesmyn Ward on exploring the stories of America's South

Jeanette Winterson brings humour and understanding to a fraught childhood

How John Grisham turned his passion for justice into bestselling legal thrillers

Viet Thanh Nguyen on redefining what it means to be a refugee

Anne Enright on her Booker-winning novel, The Gathering, and how Canada helped make her a writer

Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin on her legendary career and the power of storytelling

Chinese writer Yan Ge finds solace in creating literary worlds

Novelist Sebastian Barry explores the personal stories behind Ireland's political history

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland examines moral choice in an immoral world

Zadie Smith on writing, family and her addiction to reading

John le Carré on his legacy as a spy-turned-novelist

Oliver Sacks on how an unconventional childhood shaped his love of science

Toni Morrison on family bonds, race and coping with personal tragedy

Acclaimed poet Mark Strand was known for meditative, spare verse that was anything but simple

Julian Barnes on love, loss and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich

How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers

Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat on family, migration and the beauty of her home country, Haiti

Britain’s literary power couple Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd turn the lens on their own lives

A family affair: remembering the personal side of Martin Amis and his father, Kingsley

Celebrating Writers & Company: 33 years of exceptional interviews with the incomparable Eleanor Wachtel

Leila Slimani fuses imagination and memory in novels inspired by her French Moroccan family

For prize-winning poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje, every book is an act of discovery

US poet laureate Ada Limón celebrates nature, family and human connection in The Hurting Kind

From Antarctica to Zanzibar – Sara Wheeler on 40 years of adventure in her new book, Glowing Still

Maestro Daniel Barenboim on his life in music — and its role in bringing cultures together

Serbian British writer Vesna Goldsworthy on reimagining Anna Karenina

Max Porter blurs the line between dream and reality in his compelling, inventive fiction