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American novelist and musician James McBride is best known for his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water – about his immigrant Jewish mother and Black American father. In 2013, McBride won the National Book Award for his novel The Good Lord Bird - an irreverent portrayal of abolitionist John Brown. Eleanor Wachtel’s conversation with James McBride about these two books, and his life, first aired in 2014.

This week on Writers & Company from the Archives, Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar and librettist, Anne Carson. The author of Autobiography of Red and its sequel Red Doc> is also the first and only two-time winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetry. She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2011 about her book Nox — an elegy to her brother and a moving reflection on absence 

WARNING: This discussion deals with suicide. Novelist, memoirist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo discusses her memoir, Nine Continents, which traces her life from a Chinese fishing village to Beijing and England. It won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award. Guo spoke to Eleanor in 2018 about transforming her past into vivid art and literature. In 2023, she published a new memoir called Radical: A Life of My Own.

Looking back on Philip Roth, one of the most celebrated American writers, who died in 2018, aged 85. From Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint to The Plot Against America — Roth’s legacy lives on. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2009 about his early success, coping with fame and controversy, and the evolution of his writing... and his life.

The celebrated Congolese-French writer joined Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Vancouver Writers Festival in 2016. Mabanckou's recent books are charming explorations of childhood, family and country. His memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire relates his experience of returning to his hometown after 23 years, while his novel Tomorrow I'll Be Twenty captures his childhood spirit in the character of his 10-year-old alter ego.

This week on Writers & Company from the archives, celebrating a classic that’s also one of the most translated books in the world: Le Petit Prince or The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Biographer Stacy Schiff, filmmaker Mark Osborne and novelist Éric Dupont joined Eleanor Wachtel for the book's 75th anniversary in 2018 to reflect on its enduring appeal.

Best known for her Cazalet Chronicles and a dozen other books, English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard turned to her own life in her memoir, Slipstream. In the book, and in this conversation with Eleanor Wachtel from 2003, she reflects on her difficult upbringing in London in the 1920s and '30s, on her first marriage during the Second World War, and shares her account of her widely discussed breakup with renowned writer Kingsley Amis. Howard died 10 years ago, aged 90.

Australia's most celebrated Indigenous author Alexis Wright spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2009 about her award-winning novel Carpentaria. Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her new novel, Praiseworthy, will be published in Canada in February.

This week, to strike a celebratory note, an encore presentation of Writers & Company's 20th anniversary special with acclaimed writers Dionne Brand, Margaret Drabble, Deborah Eisenberg and Andrew O'Hagan. They joined host Eleanor Wachtel onstage at the Toronto International Festival of Authors in 2010. *This interview originally aired Oct. 31, 2010.

Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, Irish poet Seamus Heaney died ten years ago when he was 74. Known for poems that engage with the immediacy of the natural world and its physicality, Heaney spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2010 about his book Human Chain. It won UK's £10,000 Forward Prize, among Heaney's many other honours. *This interview originally aired May 23, 2010.

At 95, Lore Segal has been writing for almost sixty years. The author of Other People's Houses, Half the Kingdom and Shakespeare's Kitchen, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Segal's latest book is called Ladies' Lunch and Other Stories. It's been named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. *This interview originally aired Oct. 20, 2013.

Lydia Davis has been called "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction." Her 2007 short story collection, Varieties of Disturbance, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Davis's newest title, Our Strangers, contains 144 short stories in 300 pages. Lydia Davis spoke to Eleanor Wachtel on stage at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. *This interview originally aired June 10, 2007.