Writers worldwide bid Eleanor Wachtel and Writers & Company farewell
Zadie Smith, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie and others reflect on being interviewed by the host
After 33 years, Eleanor Wachtel, host and co-founder of the beloved radio program Writers & Company, is retiring.
To celebrate the program's legacy and her remarkable career, Wachtel presented her final episode in conversation with Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current, and American authors Gary Shteyngart and Brandon Taylor, at a live event on June 16, 2023 at the Glenn Gould Studio in downtown Toronto.
Throughout the event, writers from around the world who had been interviewed by Wachtel — Colm Tóibín, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie, Aleksandar Hemon and Zadie Smith — surprised the host with touching messages to bid her farewell.
Read below to hear what the authors shared.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith says: "Often when I'm on book tour, I'm in a low mood, not sure what I'm doing or what I'm saying, and just longing for a substantive conversation with somebody. And I could always be sure that when I got to Canada, I would have one. I'd have a real conversation about the book. It would be in-depth, and it would be by someone with a really extraordinary sensibility and intelligence and understanding of what writers do and why they do it. So I always looked forward to my Canada stop, because I knew I was going to speak to Eleanor, or I hoped I was going to speak to Eleanor.
"I'm really, really, going to miss you, Eleanor. Literary journalists like you are increasingly rare. You were a vital part of the literary ecosystem. There's no authors without readers. And not all readers are born the same. Some people really can read, and you really can read, and I was always so grateful for that talent of yours. So thank you. I hope you have a beautiful retirement. You have earned it, I'm sure everybody will say that. I also have a feeling you won't be entirely retired. But whatever you do with your new expanse of time, enjoy it. And I wish you many happy days of reading. Thanks."
Zadie Smith started writing her first novel, White Teeth, while she was still a student at Cambridge. It was translated into more than 20 languages, selling over a million copies. She is also the author of Swing Time, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, which won the 2006 Women's Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Best Book Award (Eurasia) and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She is currently a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie says: "Thank you, Canada, for you, Eleanor. And all our happy years of conversations, which have been so great and meant so much. I gather you're stepping down from Writers & Company and, well, it's a loss for all of us, but thank you for all those years, and much love from me."
Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian writer currently living in New York. He is the author of Shame, Midnight's Children, which won the 1981 Booker Prize, and The Satanic Verses, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award in 1988. His latest books include the 2023 novel Victory City and 2021 essay collection Languages of Truth.
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín says: "Eleanor Wachtel has a beautiful radio voice. I don't mean that it's a theatrical voice or a put-on voice, but it's a voice that sounds authoritative, intelligent, kind and perceptive. Face to face, she has a presence. She fills the air, somehow, with her sort of sardonic intelligence, and she's an extremely perceptive reader.
"She reads with great sympathy and she talks to you with a sense that she understands fundamentally what you're doing, and where you're coming from, and wants to tease that out in as an intelligent a way as possible, and in a way also unobtrusive — the voice can go quiet because she can be very calm, her eye can be on you very carefully. And so she's one of the great interviewers. And with each book, I looked forward to her response to the book and to her questions, and I'm not alone in that. So I think we've all been lucky over the years to have had Eleanor as such a great broadcaster, as such a great figure in the literary world. It's certainly been great for me. And I hope I have won some readers by the fact that she has, I suppose, brought out a sort of essence of a book that might make people feel that perhaps it was worth reading, and make me feel, more importantly, that it might have been worth writing."
Colm Tóibín is a bestselling Irish novelist whose books include The Master, Brooklyn, which was made into a popular movie starring Saoirse Ronan, and Nora Webster. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, won the Costa Novel Award, the Impac Award and the 2021 David Cohen Prize for Literature. In 2011, he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for contribution to Irish Literature.
George Saunders
George Saunders says: "I'm just fondly reflecting on that wonderful interview in 2017 about Lincoln in the Bardo. And what I remember most is, it was kind of a feeling of the two of us driving a Ferrari. The audience was so beautifully attentive, and it had the feeling of an audience that had been lovingly curated over many years. It was such a privilege to talk to you there.
"I remember coming off thinking, wow, I just learned so much about my own book and about writing in general. So, congratulations on 33 years of doing exactly that. So happy to have been part of it. I'm looking forward to whatever you do next, because with your mind and your generosity, every day is some kind of a gift to all of us. So thank you so much and hope to see you soon."
George Saunders is an American author and short story writer. He won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2014 for his darkly funny story collection Tenth of December. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, was a Golden Man Booker finalist and won the Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English in 2017.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen says: "About 13 years ago, I had the honour of being interviewed in person by Eleanor, on the occasion of my novel Freedom's publication. I say honoured because Eleanor has, for a very long time, been the best book interviewer in North America. What sets her apart, it's not just her acuity as a reader, her critical faculties, her sense of the big picture — it's that she just loves books. She is a real reader.
"And when you're talking to her as an author, you don't feel like you're on the spot — interviewer, interviewee. You feel like you're talking with an old friend about the thing you care most about. It's been an honour, as I say, to have been interviewed in person. It's been a pleasure every single time I've been able to speak to Eleanor. Wish her all the best going forward. You will be missed terribly on the air, but I hope to see you again soon and congratulations on an absolutely amazing career."
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. He wrote the novels The Corrections, Strong Motion, The Twenty-Seventh City, Purity and Freedom, the memoir The Discomfort Zone, and is the author of three essay collections: Farther Away, How to be Alone and The End of the End of the Earth.
Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon says: "I remember our conversations fondly and I will miss the future ones that will never happen. But I do want to congratulate you on the new stage of your life. I hope you have as much fun and as much time to read books as you wish. Much love, talk to you soon, I hope."
Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author whose books include his debut story collection, The Question of Bruno, and his novels The Lazarus Project, Nowhere Man and My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You.
