Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing . He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He favours liberalising copyright laws and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books, the most recent of which is called Radicalizing , four SF novellas "connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future." I met with C...
Sep 02, 2019•50 min
Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentine novelist and television scriptwriter best known for writing literary crime novels, most of which are best sellers in Latin America. She was born in Buenos Aires and has won numerous literary prizes including the German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Sabe and the Clarin Prize for fiction for Thursday Night Widows. Four of her novels have been translated into English by Bitter Lemon Press , all of which have been adapted into feature films. We met at The Blue Met Literary...
Aug 26, 2019•46 min
Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Alberto Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. At sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. Manguel left Argentina for Europe before the horrors of the 'disappeared' began, and just after the events of May 1968. During the 1970s he lived a peripatetic life in France, England, Italy, and Tahiti, reviewing, ...
Aug 16, 2019•1 hr 14 min
David Moscrop is a political theorist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He studies democratic deliberation, political decision-making, and digital media, and is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, and a writer for Maclean's Magazine He also provides regular political commentary for television and radio. His first book Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones was published ...
Aug 10, 2019•1 hr 6 min
Although E.K. Brown, a highly admired literary critic, once called poet and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott "one of the chief masters of Canadian literature," Scott's reputation today lies in tatters. Mark Abley in his fascinating biography Conversations with a Dead Man , The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, explains why. I met with him at his home in Point Claire near Montreal - where the ghost of Scott appeared. We talk, among others things, about boarding schools, Canada's residential school...
Aug 05, 2019•1 hr 6 min
Mordecai: The Life and Times has been called the ‘award-winningest’ book in Canadian literary history. I met with its author Charles Foran to talk about its subject Mordecai Richler. The guts, aggression, honesty and pride of the man - a man who did things, who wrote to stimulate conversation, and argument, who was socially engaged, who asked hard, uncomfortable questions. We also discuss Richler’s similarities to Pierre Trudeau. His taking on a whole movement over Quebec’s sign laws; his desire...
Jul 29, 2019•35 min
Kit Maude is a Spanish-to-English translator. He received a bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2009 he moved to Buenos Aires where he currently lives. His translations have been featured in Granta , the Literary Review , the Short Story Project , and other publications. We met at the Falena bookstore/wine bar in the Chacarita neighbourhood of Buenos Aires to talk literary tourism over a glass. Here's our conversation (the bookstore we reference t...
Jul 22, 2019•37 min
Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in Madison, NJ. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book (in which he happens to be a giant). His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor both of which won important prizes . He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the Th...
Jul 19, 2019•31 min
Ana María Cabanellas began her career as a lawyer, after which she joined the family-owned publishing company Editorial Heliasta as a partner. In 1979, she became President of Editorial Claridad which specializes in legal dictionaries, as well as fiction, philosophy and history. In 2006, Ms Cabanellas founded UnaLuna , which publishes children’s books. Over the years she has been extremely active in industry associations. For example, she is currently Vice- president of CADRA (Centro de Adminis...
Jul 15, 2019•1 hr 19 min
Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Her writing career began at age 17 thanks to a letter she wrote Abelardo Castillo requesting a job at a magazine he edited. During Argentina's so called Dirty War in the seventies and eighties, she defiantly wrote and edited several well known left-wing literary journals, subtly protesting her country's violent, repressive regime, while defending the practice of literature. She also famously engaged in correspond...
Jul 07, 2019•57 min
Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Guillermo Martínez is an Argentine novelist, detective fiction and short story writer. He earned a PhD in mathematical logic from the University of Buenos Aires, after which he worked for two years in a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Institute, in Oxford. His most successful novel is Crímenes Imperceptibles known as The Oxford Murders , written in 2003. He was awarded the Planeta Prize for this novel, which was adapted into a film in 2008, directed ...
Jul 01, 2019•49 min
Tania Craan’s career as an art director and designer spans more than three decades. For the past 25 years, she has run her freelance graphic design studio. She started her career working as a designer at Penguin Books Canada and then went on to McClelland & Stewart where she became art director. In addition to books, she has designed stamps for Canada Post, three Ontario Provincial Government inquiry reports, and annual reports for a variety of corporate clients. She "blends the disciplines ...
Jun 23, 2019•1 hr
Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She wrote the book in six months, but it took nine years to get it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up in 2013. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness-like style and tells the story of a young woman's complex relationship with her family. McBride's second novel The Lesser Bohemians w...
Jun 17, 2019•40 min
David Robinson is executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. He has been with CAUT since 1999, when he was first hired as director of communications. Prior to joining CAUT, Robinson was the senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada’s leading progressive think-tank. He has also been a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, and Carleton University in Ottawa. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and reports on higher education an...
Jun 04, 2019•37 min
Ken Lopez is a renowned antiquarian bookseller who deals in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions. He regularly issues catalogs of modern literature and less regularly, of native American literature, the literature of the Vietnam war and the 1960s, and nature writing. He also has an established record of placing authors' archives in institutional collections. Ken is a former President of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America . He operates out of Hadley, Massachu...
May 27, 2019•1 hr 9 min
In 1967 Barry Moser moved from Tennessee to New England to teach at The Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He was soon introduced to Leonard Baskin with whom he studied at Baskin's Gehenna Press. In the spring of 1969 Moser was commissioned to illustrate a trade book, The Flowering Plants of Massachusetts (it wasn't published until 1979). He became fascinated with plants and plant lore and as a result named his press Pennyroyal ( Mentha pulegium ). It produced a small number of boo...
May 20, 2019•1 hr 30 min
Carey Cranston took on the role of President of the American Writers Museum in September of 2016. Prior to that Carey served for 12 years as President of Fox College, a private career college in Chicago, and prior to that he was a Vice President at Hill & Knowlton, a global PR firm, where he led the digital and web services division We met at the Museum, and talked about, among other things, the Museum's mission, Frederick Douglass, The Great Gatsby , writing as a concept writ large, the wri...
May 11, 2019•44 min
David McKnight is an accomplished librarian and book collector, "imbued with remarkable passion and resolve." As Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), at the University of Pennsylvania David is responsible for insuring stewardship, management, discovery, and preservation of the collection and for maintaining the visibility of RBML within and outside of the Penn community. At the Penn Libraries, he has also served as Curator of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Imag...
May 07, 2019•1 hr 33 min
Levi Stahl is the marketing director of the University of Chicago Press and the editor of The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany . We met in Chicago to discuss the role of the book marketer, getting books out into the world and bought, helping the sales department, Thoreau, content and numbers, advertising and the price point of books, print on demand and short runs, shelf and display space, disseminating scholarship, advances, authenticity, and advice for authors on how to ...
Apr 29, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Wayson Choy was born in Vancouver in 1939. He spent his childhood in the city's Chinatown and subsequently attended the University of British Columbia where he studied creative writing. He moved to Toronto in 1962, and taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. His novel The Jade Peony (1995) won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His novel All That Matters , was published in 2004. I interviewed him about it some years later in Ottawa. Our conversation was among the f...
Apr 29, 2019•46 min
James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon , which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada , a finalist for the ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of The Essential Daryl Hine , which made The Partisan 's list of the best books of 2015. His poems have been published in The Paris Review , AGNI, Poetry Daily , the National Po...
Apr 22, 2019•1 hr 47 min
As the editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books , Eric Lorberer is responsible for the voice and style that has brought the magazine widespread acclaim. He is also the director of the Twin Cities Book Festival , has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and speaks at conferences and literary festivals around the country as an advocate for independent publishing and literary culture. We met at his home in Minneapolis to discuss Rain Taxi's history and the literary events it put...
Apr 18, 2019•27 min
Eric Ormsby is a poet, a writer, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies . Presently, he lives and writes in France and Prague. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has produced six poetry collections, among them Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best ...
Apr 11, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Will Rueter is the proprietor of the Aliquando Press which was founded in 1962 "to enable its proprietor to learn the basics of printing and binding books by hand." To date the Press has produced 109 books. It is located in Dundas, Ontario. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was a renowned British bookbinder, and passionate private printer. He was proprietor of the Doves Press, one of the most influential private presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its standards of quality hav...
Apr 08, 2019•54 min
Steven Temple is an antiquarian bookseller who, after operating shops on Queen Street in Toronto for forty years, moved to Welland, Ontario in 2014 where he now does business out of his home. He continues to specialize in literary books, especially Canadian literary books, general Canadiana, and select out-of-print and rare books in various fields. We met at his home in Welland, where we discussed, among other things, his passion for finding "lost" Canadian literature, parasites on the Internet,...
Apr 02, 2019•1 hr 10 min
James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, including books on David Milne, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern , was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, James lives in Hamilton, Ontario. And that's where I met him to discuss his biography of Jack McClelland, Jack, A Life with Writers . Among other things we talk of publicizing Canadian authors, happy child...
Mar 25, 2019•57 min
Mar 23, 2019•19 min
Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, he was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. His memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. We met at the Canada Council's offices in Ottawa to discuss it, along with negotiating land claims ...
Mar 17, 2019•1 hr 6 min
Marvin Post is the owner of Attic Books in London, Ontario - one of the largest, most successful used/antiquarian bookstores in Canada. I met with Marvin to discuss the reasons behind his success. Among other things we talk about buying lots of books, religious books, double downsizing, millennial debt-load, fresh stock, on-line versus in-store stock, buying buildings, skulls on shirts, shows, areas to collect in, medical books, books as investments, books into movies, fake signatures, storage u...
Mar 11, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word , a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word . Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter , shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, fem...
Mar 01, 2019•43 min
