Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Jonathan Galassi is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel,  Muse  (2015) set in the publishing world. He is also president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and an eminent translator of Italian poetry.  We met in his New York office (with the window open) to talk about, among other things, book publishing, Stanley Unwin; convincing, moving, artful voices; the capacity to he...

"Jonas Hassen Khemiri is one of the most important writers of his generation in Sweden. When his debut novel,  One Eye Red  (Ett öga rött) was published in 2003, Khemiri’s eccentric and imaginative prose made a huge splash and reached an audience far beyond traditional literary circles. The book was awarded the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut Novel and also became an enormous bestselle...

" Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. Born in New York City in 1960, he received degrees in Classics from the University of Virginia and Princeton. After completing his PhD, he moved to New York City, where he began freelance writing full time; since 1991 he has been a prolific contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to many publicatio...

Adam Gopnik has been writing for  The New Yorker  since 1986. He is a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism and of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.  We met in Montreal at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival to discuss his book At...

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, editor, translator, and professor. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including  Sun Bear  (2014),  Come On All You Ghosts  (2010),  The Pajamaist  (...

Anita Engles is the Executive Director of the American Bookbinders Museum based in San Francisco, California. It's the only museum of its kind in North America celebrating and exploring the culture and tools of bookbinders and bookbinding from its earliest forms through the changes and innovations of the industrial revolution. In addition to the craft and artistry of binding, it focuses on the sto...

Andrew Hoyem is the creative spirit of the Arion Press. He's a published poet and exhibited artist who occasionally includes his own writings and drawings in Arion books. The concepts for all Arion publications originate with Hoyem, who chooses literary texts, commissions new work from writers and artists he admires, and designs the books, including their bindings and typography. In the Press's  l...

Kris Arnett is the proprietor of Kona Bay Books  which is located in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. She also owns Hilo Bay Books in, you guessed it, Hilo, which is located on the other side of the Big Island of Hawaii.  I met with Kris recently at the Kona location to discuss bookstores. Among other things we talk about books touching everything and everyone, barbers, the Upstart Crow* bookshop...

David Bull is an ukiyo-e woodblock printer and carver who heads the Mokuhankan ukiyo-e studio in Asakusa, Tokyo. Born in Britain, Bull moved to Canada at age 5 and lived there until 1986 when he  relocated with his family to Tokyo to pursue ukiyo-e. He first discovered Japanese woodblocks while browsing an art gallery in Toronto at age 29. Intrigued, he started making his own prints without formal...

Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel 'The Blue Fox' (the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel 'From The Mouth Of The Whale' was shortlisted for both the IMPAC  Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His novel 'Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was' was awarded every Icelandi...

Alice Notley is an  American   poet  whose work has influenced generations of poets; she is considered a pioneering voice on topics such as motherhood, feminism, disobedience and domestic life. Notley has experimented widely with poetic form and has written a book of criticism, a play, and a biography. She has also edited three publications. Her collage art appeared in  Rudy Burckhardt 's film "Wa...

Eli MacLaren is an Assistant Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal. Subjects taught include Canadian poetry and fiction; First Nations writers; bibliography and the history of the book. We met to discuss an article he wrote for Canadian Poetry entitled ‘Significant Little Offerings: The Origin of the Ryerson Poetry Chap-Books, 1925–26'.   We talk, among other things, about the lite...

Jason Guriel is a poet and critic whose work has appeared in such publications as Poetry, Slate, Reader's Digest, The Walrus, Parnassus, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Criterion, and PN Review. His poetry has been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and in 2007, he was the first Canadian to receive the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine. He won Poetry's Editors Prize for...

Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator. Born in Cardiff in 1937 she has written more than ten books of poetry. In 2008 she was appointed the third  National Poet of Wales ( Ifor ap Glyn took over in 2016). In 2010 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, only the second Welsh person to receive the honour. In 2011 she was made a member of...

I met with Professor Nick Mount at his University of Toronto offices in "Toronto" to discuss his book Arrival, The Story of CanLit . We talk among other things about the pronunciation of Toronto, the non-Toronto-centricity of his book, Alistair MacLeod, the CanLit boom, early Canadian writers publishing first in the United States, novels that are so bad they're good, the 1960s, history turning int...

Zachariah Wells is the author of three collections of poetry ( Unsettled , Track & Trace , and Sum ), as well as a children’s book Anything But Hank , with Rachel Lebowitz), and a collection of critical essays . He is also the editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets  and The Essential Kenneth Leslie . His poems have been translated into Bosnian and Spanish and adapted into operatic songs by comp...

I met with famed Czech writer/novelist Ivan Klima at his home in Prague to  talk about his memoir My Crazy Century . Topics covered include the criminal conspiracy of communism, the impact on his life of the Terazin concentration camp, the thrill of freedom, forests, poisonous mushrooms, communist stupidity and lack of common sense, Potemkin villages, political apathy, great literature describing...

Guy Baxter has been University Archivist at University of Reading since 2008. His responsibilities include caring for the Archive of British Publishing and Printing , the archives of the Museum of English Rural Life, and the Beckett Collection. Guy has worked in museum archives for over 15 years and has advised on several major research projects including Staging Beckett (AHRC), Giving Voice to th...

Historian John Cole started working at the Library of Congress as a young man in 1966. Most of his books since have dealt with this venerable institution. We talk here about it's influence on American political and cultural life, about Thomas Jefferson as bibliophile, about books comprising a small part of the library's total collection; capturing, cataloging and digitizing the world's intellectua...

Stephan Delbos is a New England-born writer living in Prague, where he teaches at Anglo-American University and Charles University. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared internationally in journals such as Absinthe, Agni, Oxonian Review, PEN America, and Zoland Poetry. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). A collection of...

Series: Biblio File in France Better known for its wines, the perfection of its local spoken French, it's cathedral and chateau, the city of Tours France also has a surprisingly rich historical connection with printing and typography. I was in Tours recently and visited the  Musee de la Typographie . It may be small, but it's full of all sorts of different kinds of old printing equipment and tools...

I interviewed Lauren Elkin about her new book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London at her apartment in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris. Stepping off a rather ordinary, noisy street through a large pair of solid French (!) doors, I encountered a lovely, quiet, tree-lined pathway/courtyard en route to "an airy, comfortable writer's home, filled with books...

Yes, the background voices are distracting, but what do you expect, we're in a Welsh pub for crying out loud! Well, actually we're upstairs at the Dylan Thomas Centr e in Swansea at a bar surrounded by revellers who have just attended a hilarious poetry vs burlesque mashup down the hallway in the Centre's theatre. So everyone is pretty frisky. The performance kicked off the annual Dylan Thomas Fes...

Wikipedia tells us that "Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828) was an English engraver and  author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving , making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds . His ca...

Gaylord Schanilec is an American wood engraver , printer , designer and illustrator. He is the proprietor of  Midnight Paper Sales press. Schanilec has "set the standard for contemporary artist’s books over the last 30 years." His highly collected and unique fine press books explore his interests and experiences as well as his hometown Wisconsin landscape and community. From farming culture and th...