95:'s flagship literary program, broadcast weekly across Canada and internationally through satellite radio, online streaming and podcast. For more than 30 years, the program earned wide acclaim and a dedicated following for its hour-long, in-depth interviews with exceptional writers from around the world. The show aired Sunday afternoons on CBC Radio One at 5:00 p.m. Manitoba and west, 3:00 p.m. Ontario and east, 3:30 p.m. Newfoundland and Labrador. It repeated on Tuesdays at 3:00 p.m. in areas where the CBC Radio’s local show began at 4:00 p.m.
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203:, broadcast in 2001, featured conversations with influential figures including Jonathan Miller, Jane Goodall, Desmond Tutu, Arthur C. Clarke, Susan Sontag, Jane Jacobs, Bernardo Bertolucci, Harold Bloom, Umberto Eco and Gloria Steinem. These interviews, plus others, were published in the 2003 collection titled
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debuted on CBC Radio in
October 1990. While originally conceived as an arts magazine show, under executive producer Anne Gibson, it soon evolved into a program devoted to international writing, drawing on the interests and strengths of Wachtel and founding producer Sandra Rabinovitch. At
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also produced interviews from international literary festivals such as Sri Lanka’s Galle
Literary Festival, India’s Jaipur International Literature Festival and the Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia, the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing, the Istanbul Tanipar Literature Festival,
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featured interviews with leading fiction writers, poets, essayists, dramatists, filmmakers, biographers and critics. From
Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Ryzsard Kapuscinski and Mavis Gallant, to Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Chinua Achebe, Louise Erdrich and Yiyun Li, the program’s guests included many
334:, after 33 years on the air, in the spring of 2023. A celebratory event, recorded for broadcast as the program’s last original episode, was held on June 16, 2023, at the Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto. The event featured an onstage interview with Eleanor by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio’s
158:, often more than once, and before they’d been awarded the prize: Saul Bellow, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Abdulrazak Gurnah.
219:. She appeared at the University of Alberta’s Festival of Ideas, the reading series of the Toronto Public Library, and at literary festivals including the Toronto International Festival of Authors, the Vancouver Writers Festival, and Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival.
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interviews was the attention paid to the writer’s background and personal experience, as it related to their work. The long format also allowed for consideration of the writer’s oeuvre and connecting themes. A reading from the work was often part of the conversation.
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the time it was unusual to dedicate a full hour to a long-form interview with one author, but the format proved rewarding for both listeners and guests, who appreciated the close reading and intelligent discussion of their work.
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digital archive—over 1,000 hours of interviews--would be made available to the public online, free of charge, anywhere in the world, through a partnership with Simon Fraser
University Library’s Special Collections.
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The program continued on the air with "encores" from the program’s archives, updated and freshly introduced by
Wachtel, until the finale original episode on September 1, 2024. The show was replaced in 2024 by
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twice won the coveted CBC Award for
Programming Excellence for the best weekly show broadcast nationally, the judges noting that if they had to choose one hour of radio to take to a desert island, it would be
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On one of her more dramatic excursions in the field, Wachtel was in
Santiago, Chile, during the 2010 earthquake – and still managed to record her interviews, during aftershocks.
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Themed panel discussions, featuring several guests and often produced in connection with literary festivals, were also periodically broadcast on the program.
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a collection of reflections, correspondence and conversations with Carol
Shields (Gooselane Editions, 2007) won the Independent Publisher Book Award.
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the Cuirt
International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland, and the SHIFT festival of Canadian and Dutch Arts in Amsterdam.
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Wachtel was frequently invited to conduct onstage interviews at literary events, which were recorded for broadcast on
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Selected interviews throughout the years have been published, by permission, in journals such as
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of the most exciting names in contemporary literature, both established and upcoming.
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In 2002, Wachtel won the Jack Award for the promotion of
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In the spring of 2024, Eleanor announced in the Sunday broadcast that the complete
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402:"CBC's Eleanor Wachtel stepping down from Writers & Company after 33 years"
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In 2016, in celebration of the program’s 25 anniversary, Biblioasis published
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The program’s long-time producers were Sandra Rabinovitch and Mary Stinson.
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421:"‘Jeopardy’ star Mattea Roach to host new CBC books radio show, ‘Bookends’"
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In addition to the high-profile individual interviews that distinguished
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Fourteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature appeared on
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won the New York Festivals Bronze medal for Best Interview.
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won a Silver Medal at the New York Festivals Radio Awards.
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This article about a radio show or program in Canada is a
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193:(2018), the series expanded the range of the program .
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Memory and Myth: The Rebirth of Central Europe
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175:Reinventing India: Writing Since Independence
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187:Franco’s Ghosts: The Remaking of Spain
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