How I Wrote This

An introduction to Season 3 of the podcast, this time featuring authors based in Brooklyn, New York, USA Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

Adelle Waldman is the author of two novels: Help Wanted, published in 2024, and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. which was named one of the year’s best books in 2013 by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. In this illuminating conversation that took place shortly after the US election, Adelle talks about the job she took at a big box stor...

Joseph O’Neill has written a family history and five novels including This is the Life, The Breezes, Netherland (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Dog (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and most recently, Godwin . He also writes political reviews and essays as well as short stories, several of which have be...

Hilary Leichter is the author of two novels and a lecturer at Columbia University. In this bonus content, listen to her reading from her latest, Terrace Stories. For an in-depth conversation with Hilary, see Episode 3. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary , tells the story of a woman’s adventures in the gig economy,  something with which she has years of experience. Now a lecturer at Columbia University, she talks about the precariousness of temp work, the desire for permanence, and how time is an engine that drives fiction. In Terrace Story , her most recent novel, she returns to time in a story of thre...

Daniel Allen Cox is the author of five books. In this bonus content, listen to him reading from his memoir, I Felt the End Before It Came For an in-depth conversation with Daniel, see Episode 2. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

Since 2008,  Daniel Allen Cox  has published four novels and a memoir-in-essays. He was a finalist for the 2023 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal for his memoir,  I Felt It Before the End Came: Memoirs of a Queer ex-Jehovah’s Witness , a nominee for a National Magazine Award for his essay “You Can’t Blame Movers for Everything Broken”, and a contributor to both the  Best American...

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books. In this bonus content, listen to her reading from her latest novel, The Candy House. For an in-depth conversation with Jennifer, see Episode 1. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist of A Visit from the Goon Squad and the author of six other books as well as many nonfiction articles including a year-long series about homelessness in New York. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction while her latest, The Candy House , was named one of the New York Times ’s 10 Best Books...

Introductions to the longlisted titles, readings by their authors, and insights into how these books were made. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast

The 2024 Giller Prize shortlist was announced on October 9 and five books and authors remain. Four of the shortlisted authors join Pamela to read excerpts from their books and tell her more about them: Eric Chacour (What I Know About You), Deepa Rajagopalan (Peacocks of Instagram), Conor Kerr (Prairie Edge), and Anne Fleming (Curiosities). 

We’re working our way through the finalists for the 2024 Giller Prize. In Episode 2 of this three-episode series, we hear from: Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History), Jane Urquhart (In Winter I Get Up at Night), Corinna Chong (Bad Land), and Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts).

The 2024 Giller longlist celebrates the best in Canadian fiction. Twelve titles were selected from 112 books published between Oct.1. 2023 and Aug. 16, 2024. In this mini-series, which is a departure from our usual format, you’ll hear readings from the nominated books and brief conversations with their authors. In this first episode, Pamela is joined by: Caroline Adderson (A Way to be Happy), kath...

An introduction to Season 2 of the literary podcast about authors, their books, and the story behind their stories. This season takes place in Berlin. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

Sheana Lambert has published two collections of short stories, The Falling Woman and Oh, my darling and two novels, Radiance and Petra and been nominated for literary prizes including  the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. A Canadian with German heritage, she talks about echoes from the past and how the artistic lega...

Wiebke von Carolsfeld grew up in Berlin, studied book binding in Cologne, and apprenticed at the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witch shortly after they’d acquired the rights to The Satanic Verses . When she emigrated to Toronto, for language reasons, she shifted her aspirations to film. Her first project resulted in a nomination for Best Editing at the Genies for the film Eisenstein.   Wie...

Behzad Karim Khani is an author whose explosive debut novel Hund, Wulf, Schakal (Dog, Wolf, Jackal) tells a story of violence on the streets of Berlin, and the lives of two immigrant brothers from Iran. It’s a book that elicited rave reviews such as this one in the Suddeutschezeitung: “ Sentences you’d want to frame…simply a great work of literature .” Behzad was a boy in Tehran when the Iran / Ir...

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. She’s written four novels that have been translated into English, a memoir, several short stories, plays, and a few librettos, including the one she finished just before she spoke. Jenny writes about growing up in East Berlin and how her experience of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) shaped her worldview. Her novel,...

Andrea Wulf talks about gardens as windows into the politics, culture and science of a nation, why Alexander von Humboldt’s name belongs alongside Darwin, Einstein, and Newton; and how a group of young Germans in the small town of Jena introduced Romanticism and changed the world as we know it. Andrea is an historian who was born in India, grew up in Germany, and now lives in the UK. In London, wh...

Jonathan Garfinke l (http://jonathan-garfinkel.com/) is a Canadian playwright, poet, essayist and novelist who got his start in theatre in Georgia in the early 2000s. His plays include The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret , the controversial show about a man accused of being Ivan the Terrible; House of Many Tongues , which won him an nomination for a Governor Generals’ award, about th...

Ivana Sajko is a Croatian artist whose work crosses from literature to dance, theatre to music and experimental performance. Despite coming of age during Croatia’s War of Independence, she rejected the impulse to write about it. Later, she realized it had nevertheless affected her and influenced everything she writes. Ivana moved to Berlin in 2016 where she continued to write plays, teach, and per...

Julia Franck was born in 1970 in East Berlin in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), a part of Germany that, at the time, was behind the Iron Curtain. As a child, she fled with her mother to the West and lived for nine months in a refugee camp, where they were interrogated by agents of the secret police. Five years later, when she was just thirteen, she left her mother’s home and returned...

An introduction to the new podcast about authors, their books, and the story behind their stories. Follow on Instagram @HowIWroteThisthePodcast Sponsored by DeStiil Booksellers Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation