Writers & Company
CBC Books | | Posted: July 11, 2017 7:18 PM | Last Updated: March 19, 2021
Eleanor Wachtel
A collection of thought-provoking, engaging and stimulating interviews with some of the world's great writers by the acknowledged master of the literary interview, Eleanor Wachtel.
With great eloquence and thoughtfulness, an array of novelists, biographers, poets, essayists and journalists explore their preoccupations — artistic, personal and political — the influences on their writing, their fears and aspirations.
Among them, Michael Ondaatje speaks about creating his novel The English Patient, A.S. Byatt conveys her excitement about the many different levels of "possession," and Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter, discusses his inheritance of male violence and its effect on his writing. Highly entertaining, always revealing, the conversations in Writers & Company provide a rare view of the writer's world.
From the book
While I always prefer to interview face to face, the luxury of radio is that 'Writers & Company' can contact virtually anyone in the world who speaks English and is near a telephone. In London, Paris or New York, we invite our guests into a CBC studio; elsewhere in the United States, into the studio of an affiliate of National Public Radio. In some instances — Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg, Andre Dubus in Haverhill, Massachusetts — we send a reporter to hold a microphone in front of the guest while I talk to her/him over the phone. Then we 'mix' the two sides of the conversation — that recorded at the home of the writer, while talking to me, and that recorded in the studio in Toronto. This way, the broadcast is always 'studio quality' and is easier to listen over the extended period that many of the conversations run.
From Writers & Company: Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel by Eleanor Wachtel ©1993. Published by Knopf Canada.