Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives

In this electrifying episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1992 to hear Martha Gellhorn — novelist, journalist, and witness to nearly every major conflict of the twentieth century — read from the newly revised conclusion to her landmark book The Face of War, first published in 1959 and updated across five editions as Gellhorn found herself, again and again, unable to look away.

At 84, in what would prove to be one of her final public appearances, Gellhorn arrives at the Harbourfront stage not to reminisce but to provoke. She takes phrases we have heard so often they have lost their edges — we love our boys, better dead than red, we won the Cold War — and holds them up to the light until the rot shows through. What emerges is something rare: a moral reckoning delivered with the authority of someone who was actually there, on the ground, in Spain, in Finland, in China, across Europe, in Vietnam, in Central America, watching ordinary people absorb the violence that leaders and slogans set in motion from a safe distance.

Listen as she traces the evolution of The Face of War through five decades and five editions — each expansion driven not by ambition but by outrage she could not suppress. She describes going to Vietnam in 1966 because the reporting she was reading bore no resemblance to what she knew war actually looked like for the people living inside it. She recounts her time in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where she came to believe that American foreign policy had decided, simply, that the poor were dangerous. And she reflects on the lesson she believes governments drew from Vietnam: that the real threat to a war effort is not the enemy, but a free press.

The reading itself — Gellhorn's newly written conclusion for the 1992 edition — crackles with the same controlled fury. She takes on the arms trade with particular ferocity, arguing that governments which prosecute the drug trade while freely selling weapons to anyone who can pay are guilty of a hypocrisy that dwarfs anything crack or heroin has ever produced. She calls out the Cold War as a forty-year waste that bankrupted both superpowers while the world's poorest people paid in blood. She offers a rare note of genuine admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev — the one world leader in her experience who chose to step back from catastrophe rather than toward it. And she closes, as she always did, not with hope exactly, but with the refusal to pretend that silence is acceptable.

This recording has a great deal to say to us now. The wars Gellhorn names have changed; the logic she describes has not. Embedded journalism, managed media access, government-approved narratives of conflict — the tools she identified in 1992 have only grown more sophisticated. The gap between military spending and spending on citizens has only widened. The arms trade she called more destructive than the drug trade continues to dwarf it. And the civilians who pay the price — nameless, numerous, dying in conflicts they did not choose — remain, as she put it, out of sight.

What Gellhorn offers, in the end, is not a political programme but something more demanding: the insistence that if you believe something is evil, silence is itself a sin. She called her own contribution a squeak. It still carries.

Recommended Reading & Viewing

By Martha Gellhorn

About Martha Gellhorn

Film & Video

The audio recording of Martha Gellhorn was recorded on stage at Harbourfront in Toronto in October 1992 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Content Warning: This episode contains references to suicide. Listener discretion is advised. Please take care of yourself and seek support if needed.

In this moving episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1994 to hear Linda Gray Sexton speak candidly about the complex legacy of being Anne Sexton's daughter. Her intimate presentation at Harbourfront, allows the author to reflect on the tangled relationship between a brilliant, troubled poet and the daughter who became her literary executor at age 21—the same year Anne took her own life.

Listen as she shares the unforgettable moment of discovering a letter her mother wrote to "the 40-year-old Linda," a message across time that served as both farewell and benediction. She explores the honest, painful inversions of their relationship—including the unsettling ritual of "playing nine," where adult and child traded places in ways no child should experience. Yet she also retrieves moments of pure maternal love, like a rainy Thanksgiving afternoon when they lay together watching pheasants in the yard, a memory Anne would immortalize in her poem "The Fortress."

This recording captures Linda at a pivotal moment: twenty years after her mother's death, having moved from anger through empathy to forgiveness, ready at last to speak back to the voice that never stopped addressing her. Her journey illuminates the weight of literary executorship, the complications of loving someone who was both mentor and burden, and the hard-won understanding that came only after she herself became a mother and weathered her own depression.

As Anne Sexton wrote in the poem that gives this episode its title: "I walk, I walk. / I hold matches at street signs / for it is dark, / as dark as the leathery dead / and I have lost my green eyes / my way, my way." Anne Sexton spent her life searching for 45 Mercy Street—that metaphorical home where past and present reconcile, where confrontation joins hands with forgiveness. She never found it. But perhaps, in writing this memoir, her daughter finally did.

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SHOW NOTES

The audio recording of Linda Gray Sexton was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1994 and is used with the permission of Linda Gray Sexton and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca. 

Click here to check out Seasons One and Two of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to more than 30 previous episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes, Jamaica Kincaid and many more.

• Live or Die (1966) - Pulitzer Prize winner
• Transformations (1971)
• 45 Mercy Street (1976, posthumous)
• Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977) [ebook]

• Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994)
• Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide (2011)
• Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmations (2014)

• With Robert Lowell & his circle : Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and others (2012)
• Three-martini afternoons at the Ritz : the rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton (2021)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

In this captivating episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, step back in time to 1990 Toronto and immerse yourself in the lyrical world of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. The recording captures Heaney in an intimate reading at the Harbourfront Reading Series, where his distinctive Irish voice brings to life some of his most beloved poems, including "Digging," "Follower," and "The Railway Children."

Heaney's verse resonates with the earthy cadence of his native countryside, conjuring vivid tableaux of his heritage—his father's calloused hands excavating potatoes from resistant soil, his aunt's practiced movements transforming flour into sustenance, and his boyhood self gazing skyward, convinced that rain-slicked telegraph wires conducted not just electricity but human connection itself. With characteristic warmth and humour, Heaney considers his creative process, discussing how his Irish upbringing and English literary education influenced his distinctive poetic voice. This rare archival recording reveals not just Heaney's masterful command of language, but also his generosity of spirit and deep humanity. Whether you're a longtime admirer of Heaney's work or discovering his poetry for the first time, this episode offers a remarkable opportunity to hear one of the 20th century's greatest poets bringing his words to life in his own voice.

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This audio recording of Seamus Heaney, recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1990, is used with the kind permission of Faber & Faber and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, as well as the Toronto International Festival of Authors.Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.  

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES

Works by Seamus Heaney

Death of a Naturalist (print edition)
New Selected Poems (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone (print edition) (ebook)
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose (print edition)
Station Island (print edition) 

Other works about Heaney and other materials

On Seamus Heaney by R.F. Foster (print edition)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (print edition)
The Poet & the Piper: Music by Seamus Heaney and Liam O'Flynn (music file via Hoopla) 
Seamus Heaney's Poetry of Remembrance (documentary via Kanopy)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

This conversation between Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and Bob Rae, recorded in 2000, offers a time capsule of North American relations at a pivotal moment. The interview captures Fuentes just after Mexico's historic election that ended the PRI party's 71-year rule—a seismic political shift that he explains with characteristic depth and nuance. While Fuentes delves into Mexican politics with a detail that might seem excessive to casual listeners, his purpose is profound: he's illustrating how Mexico's complex political evolution deserves the same serious consideration given to more dominant nations.

What's particularly striking, viewed from today, is Fuentes' perspective on North American identity and free trade. Speaking when NAFTA was relatively new, he offers insights that feel remarkably prescient as we witness the pendulum swing from the market-linked regional identities of the 1990s toward the more protectionist national boundaries of today. As a cosmopolitan intellectual fluent in Spanish, English, and French, Fuentes represents a vision of North America that transcends borders while acknowledging deep cultural differences—"the differences are huge," he admits.

Despite his global perspective, Fuentes finds his deepest meaning in the personal: "Grandmothers are the best novelists," he tells Rae, suggesting that family storytelling contains more authentic truth than official histories. This tension between grand political narratives and intimate personal stories runs throughout their conversation, as Fuentes discusses his disciplined writing routine, his diplomat father's influence, and the powerful female protagonist of his then-new novel, The Years with Laura Diaz.

Throughout this exchange, we witness Fuentes' remarkable ability to weave together cultural creation and political engagement, offering a unified vision of human experience that remains relevant despite—or perhaps because of—the dramatic changes in our world since 2000.

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The audio recording of Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Bob Rae was recorded on stage in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.   

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES

Works by Carlos Fuentes

The Old Gringo (ebook) (print edition)
The Years with Laura Diaz (print edition) (ebook)
Vlad: a Novel (audiobook) (ebook)
The Death of Artemio Cruz (print book)
Terra Nostra (print book)
Where the Air is Clear (print book)
Aura (print book)

Other Related Books or Materials

• A World of Ideas. Writers. 2010 documentary by Bill Moyers about key Latin American writers including Fuentes.

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

In October of 2000, Ursula K. Le Guin sat down with CBC's Marilyn Powell to discuss her novel, The Telling. Listening to their conversation now feels like opening a time capsule – one that paradoxically contains prescient observations about how we both preserve and erase our past. Le Guin speaks of editing with razor blades, of physically cutting away words from paper – a practice that feels almost mythological in our age of ephemeral keystrokes and vanishing digital drafts. Yet within this seemingly dated discussion emerges a timeless truth: that our past exists only through the artifacts and stories we choose to keep. As she weaves between discussing myth-making and the tactile nature of writing, Le Guin reveals how community-held stories become the framework through which we understand our history. These aren't just tales, she suggests, but rather the very architecture of human memory, the scaffolding that holds our collective past in place. There's something haunting about hearing the author, now herself part of our literary past, contemplating how we maintain connections to what came before. Yet in her voice, we hear not anxiety but wonder at how each generation finds new ways to tell its stories, to make sense of where it's been.

Perhaps that's the most enduring message from this conversation across time: that while the tools we use to record and share our stories may change, the essential human need to weave meaning from memory remains constant, evolving and adapting like a living thing.

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The audio recording of Ursula Le Guin in conversation with Marilyn Powell was recorded on stage at in Toronto in October of 2000 and is used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.  

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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Works by Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Telling (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Lathe of Heaven (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Left Hand of Darkness (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
The Word for World is Forest (ebook)

Other works about Le Guin and other materials mentioned:
Ursula Le Guin: the Last Interview and Other Conversations (print edition)
Ursula K. Le Guin and the Ambiguous Utopia (emovie)
Earthsea, 2005 (DVD)
TPL Blog piece from 2018 on Le Guin and her legacy (link here)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

EPISODE SUMMARY

Listening to this 1988 conversation between Nobel-prize winning American writer, Saul Bellow, and former Canadian Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, we possess the advantage of hindsight. In the midst of a US presidential election, Bellow bemoans the vapid discourse between candidates George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis—their language constrained by groupthink and moral rigidity and the fact that neither one says anything worth listening to. One almost wants to say aloud: "Bellow, stop! Be careful what you wish for!" After the election we've just had—36 years later—it seems almost quaint to think that US presidential candidates are plagued with the problem of not saying enough. Clarkson delicately puts pressure on Bellow to claim a tribe: not only in terms of his Jewishness, but is he really a misogynist, and what's the deal with the accusations of racism against him? Bellow's defense that these questions feel "McCarthyite" in their demand for loyalty is both incisive and ironically blind to its own implications. Though he stands as one of America's most significant literary voices of the 20th century, Bellow emerges here as a figure suspended between eras, embodying both timeless insight and the beautiful limitations of his age.

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The audio recording of Saul Bellow in conversation with Adrienne Clarkson was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988. It's used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca. 

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES

Works by Saul Bellow
More Die of Heartbreak (print edition) (ebook)
Dangling Man (print edition) (ebook)
Humboldt's Gift (print edition) (audiobook)
Herzog (print edition) 
There is Simply too much to Think About: Collected Essays (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Saul Bellow: Letters (print edition) (ebook)

Works about Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow: I was a Jew and an American and a Writer by Gerald Soring (print edition)
Saul Bellow's Heart: a Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow (print edition)

Other Related Books or Materials

The Adventures of Saul Bellow: a video featuring Martin Amis on Bellow's life and career
Seize the Day: a 1986 film adaptation of a 1965 Saul Bellow work
"Saul Bellow is now a stamp" (this link opens an article from Lithub from Feb 2024)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

The best kinds of conversations should meander and detour, trip over delicate areas, double down when a point must be emphatically asserted. After all, the ostensible subject of this 1997 on-stage chat between Dionne Brand and Jamaica Kincaid is the release of Kincaid's memoir, My Brother. But this book gets only a brief nod early on and the subject is largely abandoned for other thoughts and digressions. You can't for a moment fault either of these vital writers for that fact, as important and provocative as Kincaid's book is, for even when planned, a conversation best works when the unexpected comes out, when an anecdote or a memory surfaces that opens up a new avenue for exploration. There is a striking chemistry here between these two very different kinds of writers (though on the surface they seem to share a number of similarities): they agree, they laugh, they riff on each other's thoughts, all to wonderful effect. The chemistry is so strong, one suspects, that any subject they choose to explore would be worth listening to. So pay close attention because another great thing about good conversations: they are fleeting and may only happen once. 

Works by Jamaica Kincaid

My Brother (print edition)
See Now Then (print edition) (ebook)
Annie John (print edition) (ebook)
A Small Place (print edition) (audiobook)
Lucy (print edition) (ebook)
At the Bottom of the River (print edition)

Works by Dione Brand

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (ebook)
Beyond Borders: Arab Feminists Talk About Their Lives - East and West (DVD)

Other Related Books or Materials

• "An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children" (this link opens an article from The New Yorker from Oct 2024)
• "Walking Children Through a Garden of Good and Evil"  Visiting Jamaica Kincaid's Vermont Garden  (this link opens an article from The Harvard Gazette from Jul 2024)
• "This is How You Smile" by Gazelle Mba (this link opens an article in The London Review of Books from Feb 2024)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

In 1988, when Mario Vargas Llosa sat down on a Toronto stage with Adrienne Clarkson, he hadn't yet won his Nobel Prize for Literature (that came in 2010) so he wasn't yet a "central" figure in the world of writing. In this conversation, he teases out the hazy line between being an artist (who inhabits the world of the imagination), and being a professional politician (who inhabits the world of practical problem-solving) in a way that reflects a very different vision for the role for the artist in a society. In North America, we're more ambivalent about professional practitioners of literature who stray too far into the world of politics, as if political life will sully them and contaminate the artistic vision. But in Vargas Llosa's native Peru (as in many countries), it's expected that writers will be asked to comment on politics, and not doing so undermines the role of the public intellectual. As he so aptly notes, literature "... is something that can help people to live, that can help people to solve problems [...] literature is important, [and]  rooted in life. And this idea is one of the reasons why writers are pushed in Latin America to be involved in political problems and in the public debate." It's a symbol, perhaps, of the marginal role that artists in general (and writers in particular) play in contemporary North American society. And in the background a series of important questions about the role of the artist: What does a society look like when writers are more actively involved in political discussion and even political contests? What does it do to politics when writers are central players? And more importantly, what does it do to literature? 

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This audio recording of Mario Vargas Llosa in conversation with Adrienne Clarkson was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988. It is used with the kind permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Thanks to TIFA for allowing us access to their archives for this series. Find out more about the Festival and its annual festival along with many other activities at FestivalOfAuthors.ca. 

Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.

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SHOW NOTES

Works by Mario Vargas Llosa (in English)

The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (print edition)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (print edition)
Time of the Hero (print edition) (ebook)
Who Killed Palomino Molero (print edition) (ebook)
The Call of the Tribe (print edition)
Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America (print edition)
Conversation in the Cathedral (print edition)

Works by Mario Vargas Llosa (en Español)

La civilización del espectáculo (print edition) (ebook)
La fiesta del chivo (audiobook)
El fuego de la imaginación : libros, escenarios, pantallas y museos (print edition)

Other Related Books or Materials

Mario Vargas Llosa: a Life of Writing (print edition)
Belonging: the Paradox of Citizenship by Adrienne Clarkson (print edition) (ebook)
The Shining Path : Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes (print edition)

About the Host of Writers Off the Page

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to  Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

This audio recording of Hilary Mantel in conversation with Rosemary Sullivan was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1997. It is used with the kind permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Thanks to TIFA for allowing us access to their archives for this series. Find out more about the Festival and its annual festival along with many other activities at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.

Click here check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes featuring some of the 20th century's most beloved writers, including Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and more.

Works by Hilary Mantel in Toronto Public Library's collection:

An Experiment in Love (print edition) (ebook)
Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book One) (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book Two) (print edition, ebook, audiobook) 
The Mirror and the Light (Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book Three) (print edition) ebook) (audiobook)
A Change of Climate (print edition) (ebook)
Vacant Possession (print edition) (ebook)
A Place of Greater Safety (print edition) (ebook)
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (print edition)

Other Related Books or Materials in our collections:

The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Stalin's Daughter : the Extraordinary and Tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
(print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Wolf Hall - Masterpiece Theatre's 2015 movie adaptation (DVD)

About the Host

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.

Music is by Yuka

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.

Works by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose

Foucault’s Pendulum

The Prague Cemetery

On the Shoulders of Giants

Other Related Books or Materials

Signs and Secrets: the Worlds of Umberto Eco (2013 documentary)

Always Narrating: The Making and Unmaking of Umberto Eco (link opens a 2020 Los Angeles Review of Book article)

The Man Who Loved Books: Interview with Umberto Eco (link opens a 2020 Counterpunch article)

Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction, No. 197 (link opens a 2008 Paris Review article)

Umberto Eco, 84, Best-selling Academic Who Navigated Two Words (link opens a 2016 New York Times obituary)

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About the Host

Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.

Music is by Yuka

From the Archives

Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.

Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.