Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

At the time of this interview, John Freeman was president of The National Book Critics Circle . Founded in 1974, the NBCC is a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers who honor quality writing and communicate with one another about common concerns. We met at BookExpo in New York and talked, among other things, about the NBCC’s awards program , the blog called Critica...

Bernard Margolis was President of the Boston Public Library (BPL) from 1997-2008. Founded in 1848, the BPL was the first large free municipal library in the United States. Mr. Margolis has served on the Governing Council of the 63,000-member American Library Association (ALA), and has won many awards including “Colorado Librarian of the Year", two John Cotton Dana library public relations awards,...

John Wronoski is a rare book dealer who specializes in literature, and primary works in the history of ideas in English, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. His shop, Lame Duck Books , contains the most significant selection of 19th and 20th century Spanish language literature in the world, and important originals of 17th and 18th century English poetry. In addition to performing the traditional...

Elias Khoury is author of eleven novels including Little Mountain and Gates of the City . He is currently professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University, and editor in chief of the literary supplement of Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar . We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival , about his latest novel in English Gate of the Sun , of...

Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , Tin House , Saturday Night , and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays . He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son. We talk here, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival , among other things about voice...

Lydia Davis is a contemporary American author and translator of French. From 1974 to 1978 she was married to Paul Auster , with whom she has a son. She has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986). Her most recent collection is not Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, but rather Varieties of Disturbance , published by Farr...

C.S. Richardson is an accomplished book designer who has worked in publishing for over twenty years. He is a multiple time recipient of the Alcuin Award (Canada’s highest honour for excellence in book design) and a frequent lecturer on publishing, design and communications. A rare bird indeed, he recently published his first novel The End of the Alphabet , and is currently at work on his second. W...

Barbara Clubb is City Librarian and CEO of the Ottawa Public Library, past president of the Canadian Library Association, a member of the International Relations Committee of the ALA/Public Library Association; a director for the Canadian Writers Foundation and Monthly Book Reviewer for CBC Ottawa Radio One. In this fascinating, wide ranging conversation we talk about the role of a city librarian...

John Metcalf is a highly regarded author who happens to have edited many of Canada’s foremost short story writers, including Lisa Moore , Alice Munro , and Michael Winter . Born in Carlisle, England, and educated at the University of Bristol, he emigrated to Canada in 1962. In addition to his own writings (novels, stories and essays), he currently holds the un-salaried post of Senior Editor at the...

Amanda Earl writes erotic fiction in Ottawa, Canada, as much for her own pleasure as anything else. Her stories have consistently been selected for publication in Carroll and Graf’s annual Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica . Amanda publishes and writes poetry, is managing editor of the Bywords Quarterly Journal, and hosts Bywords.ca , a website invaluable to Ottawans interested in local literary ev...

Ronald Cohen is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill  published in 2006: a ‘richly annotated work’ containing thousands of entries, with detailed descriptions of each work by Churchill, including information on content, typography,paper, illustrations, maps, facsimiles, bindings, dust jackets, publication and printing history, translations, and library/collection loc...

David Franklin is former Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and editor of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Renaissance in Florence , a catalogue published by Yale University Press to accompany a major exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery from May 29, 2005 to September 5, 2005. We talk here mostly about the exhibition catalogue as book: what differentiates it...

Christopher Pratt is one of Canada’s most ‘prominent’ painters. He is now also a published poet. We talk here, in his home of St Mary’s Bay, Newfoundland on the Salmonier River, about his book A Painter’s Poems (Breakwater Books , 2005), about parallels between his writing and his art, emptiness, loneliness, cleanliness, juxtaposing real and imagined worlds, getting it right, abandonment, absence...

Barbara Reid’s plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children’s book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony-tails, playing h...

Ramona Dearing lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine’s Quill Pre...

Lisa Moore ’s fiction has been published widely in literary magazines and in anthologies. Her two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open have received praise for their ’supple sensuality and emotional authenticity.’ She lives in Newfoundland. We talked there, and here about her recently published first novel, Alligator, about tea, pine martins, time, the exotic, Tasmania, Ceza...

Here's Tim Parks on his novel Cleaver: "Cleaver comes out of my love of the South Tyrol and a growing awareness/ irritation/ anxiety about the invasive nature of the public voice, the spoken media, in our minds and lives. And of course Cleaver, this charismatic, chaotic, destructive, hatefully likeable man who seemed just right for bringing out all the tensions between the seductive fizz of public...

Michael Crummey is a Newfoundland-born poet, short story writer and novelist. He is known for his historical fiction. His multi-award winning novel River Thieves depicts the relationship between European settlers and the last of the Beothuk indians in the early 19th Century. The Wreckage tells the story of a young Newfoundland soldier and his beloved during and after World War ll.  We talk about M...

James O. Born is a Special Agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and author of three best selling crime novels. We talk about his most recent, Escape Clause ; about blurbs, putting humour and a human face on the real life experience of cops, how life followed art in this novel, Karma and good moral compasses, the goal of writing compelling prose with surprise endings, cheer leading...

Australian Tim Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), at the age of 19. It won the Australian Vogel National Literary Award. Born in Perth, in 1960, he is the author of Shallows (1986), a novel set in a whaling town, and Cloudstreet (1991), the story of two working-class families rebuilding their lives. Both won Miles Franklin Awards. T he Riders (1995) was shortlisted for the Booke...

ANDREW MILLER was born in Bristol…in 1960 (induced, according to the family legend, by his mother eating a large supper of fish and chips). At age eleven, having convincingly failed his Eleven Plus, he went to boarding school in Wiltshire…Master of Arts in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in 1991…PhD from Lancaster University…In February 1996, after six years of wri...

Wendy Duff is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research interests are user studies, archival description, and electronic records. We talk here about the differences between Librarians and Archivists, and other important ‘stuff’. This is a public epis...

Jim Roberts is the owner of  Books End Bookstore in Syracuse , New York. We talk here among other things about salt, the AB Bookman's weekly magazine, the emergence and evolution of book-selling on the Internet from Interloc, to Alibris, to Abebooks; collecting General Custer, war books and the histories of American military divisions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with o...

Prizes are ridiculous. Winners are often poor writers. Short lists are political. The whole world kneels before a bunch of Swedish academics who only read books in translation...  So what does Tim Parks really think of book awards? Listen up. You'll also get his thoughts on Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acces...

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