The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Curator David Franklin on Exhibition Catalogues

David Franklin is former Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and editor of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence , a catalogue published by Yale University Press to accompany a major exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery from May 29, 2005 to September 5, 2005. We talk here mostly about the exhibition catalogue as book: what differentiates it from typical works of scholarly non-fiction, the challenges of catering both to the research commun...

Christopher Pratt Artist Poet

Christopher Pratt is one of Canada’s most ‘prominent’ painters. He is now also a published poet. We talk here, in his home of St Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland on the Salmonier River, about his book A Painter’s Poems (Breakwater Books , 2005), about parallels between his writing and his art, emptiness, loneliness, cleanliness, juxtaposing real and imagined worlds, getting it right, abandonment, absence and how it draws in readers and viewers, leaving important things unsaid, seasons, a man drawing cir...

Barbara Reid on Illustrating Children's Books

Barbara Reid’s plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children’s book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony-tails, playing hooky, and war.

Ramona Dearing on her short story collection So Beautiful

Ramona Dearing lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine’s Quill Press. We talk here about her stories, my favourites, and hers, bodies in bags, judging one’s own work,...

Tim Parks on his novel Cleaver

Here's Tim Parks on his novel Cleaver: "Cleaver comes out of my love of the South Tyrol and a growing awareness/ irritation/ anxiety about the invasive nature of the public voice, the spoken media, in our minds and lives. And of course Cleaver, this charismatic, chaotic, destructive, hatefully likeable man who seemed just right for bringing out all the tensions between the seductive fizz of public life, various family nightmares and the magnificent emptiness of the mountains." We talk about the ...

Lisa Moore on her novel Alligator

Lisa Moore ’s fiction has been published widely in literary magazines and in anthologies. Her two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open have received praise for their ’supple sensuality and emotional authenticity.’ She lives in Newfoundland. We talked there, and here about her recently published first novel, Alligator, about tea, pine martins, time, the exotic, Tasmania, Cezanne, St. John's as a bowl of oranges, Cubism, being in the present, survival, light, if it’s ever ok...

Michael Crummey on the historical novel

Michael Crummey is a Newfoundland-born poet, short story writer and novelist. He is known for his historical fiction. His multi-award winning novel River Thieves depicts the relationship between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk indians in the early 19th Century. The Wreckage tells the story of a young Newfoundland soldier and his beloved during and after World War ll. We talk about Michael's goal of taking the bare facts of historical events and making the people in those events fee...

James O. Born on Writing Crime Fiction

James O. Born is a Special Agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and author of three best selling crime novels. We talk about his most recent, Escape Clause ; about blurbs, putting humour and a human face on the real life experience of cops, how life followed art in this novel, Karma and good moral compasses, the goal of writing compelling prose with surprise endings, cheer leading competitions, smacking people who talk of movie options without deliverying, Jaws, the compulsion to...

Novelist Tim Winton: In Conversation

Australian Tim Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), at the age of 19. It won the Australian Vogel National Literary Award. Born in Perth, in 1960, he is the author of Shallows (1986), a novel set in a whaling town, and Cloudstreet (1991), the story of two working-class families rebuilding their lives. Both won Miles Franklin Awards. T he Riders (1995) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize. He is also the author of two collections of short stor...

Andrew Miller on Literary Prizes and his novel The Optimists #21

ANDREW MILLER was born in Bristol…in 1960 (induced, according to the family legend, by his mother eating a large supper of fish and chips). At age eleven, having convincingly failed his Eleven Plus, he went to boarding school in Wiltshire…Master of Arts in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in 1991…PhD from Lancaster University…In February 1996, after six years of writing, ‘Ingenious Pain’ his first novel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Grinzane Cavour...

Wendy Duff on the difference between Librarians and Archivists #20

Wendy Duff is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research interests are user studies, archival description, and electronic records. We talk here about the differences between Librarians and Archivists, and other important ‘stuff’.

Jim Roberts on the Evolution of Bookselling #19

Jim Roberts is the owner of Books End Bookstore in Syracuse , New York. We talk here among other things about salt, the AB Bookman's weekly magazine, the emergence and evolution of book-selling on the Internet from Interloc, to Alibris, to Abebooks; collecting General Custer, war books and the histories of American military divisions.

Tim Parks on Prizes, Awards, Coetzee and Rushdie #18

Prizes are ridiculous. Winners are often poor writers. Short lists are political. The whole world kneels before a bunch of Swedish academics who only read books in translation... So what does Tim Parks really think of book awards? Listen up. You'll also get his thoughts on Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee.

Prof. Joseph Khoury on Hamlet, Acts 1 & 2 #17

Prof. Don Nichol on the History of Book Publishing Copyright #16

Dr. Don Nichol is an English Professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. He has been researching copyright law and its role in the history of writing and publishing for more than a decade. He is the author of Pope’s Literary Legacy, published by the Oxford Bibliographical Society in 1992, and editor, more recently, of The New Foundling Hospital for Wit 1768-1773 , a three-volume set containing enhanced facsimiles of some of the 18th-century’s most popular and salacious English sati...

Fran Durako on her Kelmscott Bookshop #15

Fran Durako is owner of the Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore, Maryland. We talk here about her love of William Morris , fine printing and Victorian book illustration, the transition from book collector to seller, and art as a ‘positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to.’

David Gilmour on his novel A perfect Night to go to China #14

Acclaimed Canadian novelist and critic David Gilmour was born in London, Ontario in 1949. His first novel, Back on Tuesday , was published in 1986, followed by How Boys See Girls in 1991 and An Affair with the Moon in 1993. Lost Between Houses , published in 1999, was nominated for the Trillium Book Award. Sparrow Nights , his fifth novel, was published by Random House to rave reviews. His latest novel A Perfect Night to go to China won Canada’s 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction. I met w...

Martin Levin on the role of the book review editors #13

Martin Levin was for 17 years the popular (particularly at Book Expo Canada where we met) Books Editor at the (Toronto) Globe and Mail newspaper, and, according to Dennis Johnson, founder of MobyLives and co-founder/co-publisher of Melville House, one of the most esteemed in the business. We talk here about namesakes in Tolstoy, guilt, tragedy, sorrow at not being able to review anywhere near all worthy books, blockbusters syphoning money away from deserving titles, getting boys to read books, g...

Jamie Byng on Myth and the Art of Publishing #12

Jamie Byng is Publisher at Canongate Books, an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thanks in part to his tireless efforts, and the huge success of its Booker-winning novel Life Of Pi , Canongate won Publisher Of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2003. It won again in 2009. Jamie is also the originator, and (was) first Chair of World Book Night. In 2005 he launched the first in a series of Canongate novellas that feature ancient myths from various cultures reimagined an...

Peter Ellis London-based Antiquarian Bookseller #11

Interview with used antiquarian book dealer Peter Ellis at his shop on Cecil Court Road in London, England.

Paul Muldoon on Poetry #9

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. He has served as both president of the Poetry Society (UK) and as Poetry Editor at The New Yorker magazine. He was in Ottawa, Canada for the April 2006 edition of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We met at my apartment...

Derek Walcott on Poetry #8

Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott read at the Blue Metropolis Writers Festival in Montreal several weeks ago. We talk here about England, parents, Ted Hughes, William Blake, combining painting and poetry, the sea, getting laid, and the theme of returning. In addition to experiencing him as an articulate, moving communicator, I also found Derek Walcott to be, like many great men, humble and approachable.

Gill Coleridge on the role of the Literary Agent #7

Gill Coleridge is a partner with Rogers, Coleridge & White , one of the top literary agencies in the world. I spoke with her at the 2006 London Bookfair about how discounting squeezes authors; about the role of the literary agent, how she champions her stable of writers, her bets on hot new literary talent (Peter Hobbs, Adam Thirlwell, Phil Lamarshe, Louise Dean, Jim Younger), plus her thoughts about cake, and suicide....

Neil Wilson, founder Ottawa International Writers Festival #6

Neil Wilson is a former journalist/broadcaster, future publisher, current long-distance runner and founding director of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, considered "one of Canada's greatest literary festivals." We talk about his love of Irish literature and poetry, his founding of the Festival in 1997, what motivates him to do what he does, and this Spring’s impressive, Beckett-backed line-up which goes on stage April 17, 2006. We met at my apartment in Ottawa. Copyright © 2006 by Nige...

Faber CEO Stephen Page on the Role of the Publisher #4

Here is my interview with Stephen Page (unparalleled name for a man in his position) CEO and Publisher of Faber and former British Publishers Association President, conducted hurriedly at the 2006 London Book Fair. We talk briefly about the role and necessity of publishing houses, the impact of the Internet, discounting, supermarkets, ebooks, and 3 for 2 band-aids....

Lexicographer Jonathon Green talks Slang #3

Rap as rebellion, slang as hipness, and jargon as obfuscatory exclusionary pretense. These are topics discussed during my interview with world-renowned slang lexicographer Jonathon Green last month at his home office in London, England. And bloody invigorating it was too. We talk about why penises are funny and beat out vaginas, why slang is negative and misogynist and how it carries a kind of inventive cleverness seldom found in the harmless drudgery of every day language. We talk too about Sam...

Maggie Knaus on the Rockcliffe Park Book Fair #2

The Rockcliffe Park Book Fair is one of the oldest, biggest, best used-book sales in Ontario, if not Canada. It's a veritable institution. Book dealers travel across the country every year to cash in on the great deals. More than 3500 volunteer hours go into the making of it annually (other schools boast when they get six hundred over the course of a year). Twenty six thousand books were sold last year with the same number left over. The Book Fair is organized with precision and good humour. It ...

Entrepreneur Kensel Tracy on Self Publishing #1

I’ve known Kensel Tracy for 20 years. We met in 1985 when he was in charge of marketing at the Ottawa-Carleton Tourism Commission and I was Membership Director at the Board of Trade. I can’t think of anyone I’ve ever met who is quite as energetic and creative. Kensel is a true marketer. Over the years he has worked with Ottawa's Festival of Spring, Winterlude, Habitat for Humanity and many other good community causes. More recently he has been a business coach helping small companies to market t...