Nigel Beale's Biblio File Podcast

Bob Rae is senior counsel with the law firm Olthuis, Kleer Townshend and teaches public policy and governance at the University of Toronto. He was the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and was the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. He was previously leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party and the 21st Premier of Ontario, from 1990 until 1995. Between 1978 and...

Ricardo Cayuela  is a writer, essayist, and founding editor of  Letras Libres  (" The New Yorker  of Mexico"). In 2013 he was appointed Director General of Publications by the Mexican government. Today he is the president of Random House-Mondadori-Alfaguara and Editorial Director of Penguin Random House México.  We met at the Blue Met Literary Festival in Montreal to talk about, among other things...

Jody Wilson-Raybould , also known by her initials  JWR  and by her Kwak’wala name  Puglaas , is a Canadian politician and the Independent Member of Parliament for the riding of Vancouver Granville. She served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General in the cabinet of Justin Trudeau from 2015 until January 2019 and then as Minister of Veterans Affairs of Canada from January 14, 2019, until resig...

  Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing . He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He favours liberalising copyright laws and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books, the most recent of which is called Radicalizing , four SF novellas "connected by social, technolo...

Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentine novelist and television scriptwriter best known for writing literary crime novels, most of which are best sellers in Latin America. She was born in Buenos Aires and has won numerous literary prizes including the German LiBeraturpreis for  Elena Sabe and the Clarin Prize for fiction for Thursday Night Widows. Four of her novels have been translated into English by  B...

Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Alberto Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. At sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. Manguel left Argentina for Europe before the horrors of the 'disappeared' began, and just after the events of May 1...

Although E.K. Brown, a highly admired literary critic, once called poet and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott "one of the chief masters of Canadian literature," Scott's reputation today lies in tatters.  Mark Abley in his fascinating biography  Conversations with a Dead Man , The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, explains why.  I met with him at his home in Point Claire near Montreal - where the gho...

Mordecai: The Life and Times has been called the ‘award-winningest’ book in Canadian literary history. I met with its author Charles Foran to talk about its subject Mordecai Richler. The guts, aggression, honesty and pride of the man - a man who did things, who wrote to stimulate conversation, and argument, who was socially engaged, who asked hard, uncomfortable questions. We also discuss Richler’...

Kit Maude  is a Spanish-to-English translator. He received a bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2009 he moved to Buenos Aires where he currently lives. His translations have been featured in  Granta , the  Literary Review ,  the  Short Story Project , and other publications. We met at the Falena bookstore/wine bar in the  Chacarita neighbourhood of...

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in Madison, NJ. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book (in which he happens to be a giant). His books include  The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes  and  The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor both of which won important prizes .  He has held visit...

Ana María Cabanellas began her career as a lawyer, after which she joined the family-owned publishing company Editorial Heliasta as a partner. In 1979, she became President of Editorial Claridad  which specializes in legal dictionaries, as well as fiction, philosophy and history. In 2006, Ms Cabanellas founded UnaLuna , which publishes children’s books.  Over the years she has been extremely acti...

Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Her writing career began at age 17 thanks to a letter she wrote  Abelardo Castillo  requesting a job at a magazine he edited. During Argentina's so called Dirty War in the seventies and eighties, she defiantly wrote and edited several well known left-wing literary journals, subtly protesting her country's violent,...

Series:  Biblio File in Buenos Aires Guillermo Martínez is an Argentine novelist, detective fiction and short story writer. He earned a PhD in mathematical logic from the University of Buenos Aires, after which he worked for two years in a postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Institute, in Oxford. His most successful novel is Crímenes Imperceptibles  known as  The Oxford Murders , written in...

Tania Craan’s career as an art director and designer spans more than three decades. For the past 25 years, she has run her freelance graphic design studio. She started her career working as a designer at Penguin Books Canada and then went on to McClelland & Stewart where she became art director. In addition to books, she has designed stamps for Canada Post, three Ontario Provincial Government inqu...

Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel,  A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing , won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. She wrote the book in six months, but it took nine years to get it published. Galley Beggar Press of Norwich finally picked it up in 2013. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness-like style and tells the story o...

David Robinson is executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. He has been with CAUT since 1999, when he was first hired as director of communications. Prior to joining CAUT, Robinson was the senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada’s leading pro­gressive think-tank. He has also been a lecturer at Simon Fraser University, and Carleton Univ...

Ken Lopez is a renowned antiquarian bookseller who deals in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions. He regularly issues catalogs of Modern Literature and less regularly issues catalogs of Native American Literature, the Literature of the Vietnam War and the 1960s, and Nature Writing. He also has an established record of placing authors' archives in institutional collections. Ke...

In 1967 Barry Moser moved from Tennessee to New England to teach at The Williston Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He was soon introduced to Leonard Baskin with whom he studied at Baskin's Gehenna Press. In the spring of 1969 Moser was commissioned to illustrate a trade book,  The Flowering Plants of Massachusetts  (it wasn't published until 1979). He became fascinated with plants and plant...

Carey Cranston took on the role of President of the American Writers Museum in September of 2016. Prior to that Carey served for 12 years as President of Fox College,  a private career college in Chicago, and prior to that he was a Vice President at Hill & Knowlton, a global PR firm, where he led the digital and web services division  We met at the Museum, and talked about, among other things, the...

David McKnight is an accomplished librarian and book collector, "imbued with remarkable passion and resolve." As Director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), at the University of Pennsylvania David is responsible for insuring stewardship, management, discovery, and preservation of the collection and for maintaining the visibility of RBML within and outside of the Penn community. At the...

Levi Stahl is the marketing director of the University of Chicago Press and the editor of  The Getaway Car: A Donald E. Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany .  We met in Chicago to discuss the role of the book marketer, getting books out into the world and bought, helping the sales department, Thoreau, content and numbers, advertising and the price point of books, print on demand and short runs, shelf a...

Wayson Choy was born in Vancouver in 1939. He spent his childhood in the city's Chinatown and subsequently attended the University of British Columbia where he studied creative writing. He moved to Toronto in 1962, and taught at Humber College from 1967 to 2004. His novel  The Jade Peony  (1995) won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His novel  All That Matters , was pub...

James Pollock is the author of  Sailing to Babylon , which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and  You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada , a finalist for the  ForeWord Review's  Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of  The Essential Daryl Hine , which made  The Partisan 's list of the be...

As the editor of  Rain Taxi Review of Books , Eric Lorberer is responsible for the voice and style that has brought the magazine widespread acclaim. He is also the director of the  Twin Cities Book Festival , has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and speaks at conferences and literary festivals around the country as an advocate for independent publishing and literary cu...

Eric Ormsby is a poet, a writer, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at  McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies . Presently, he lives and writes in France and Prague. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has produced six poetry c...