The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Series: Biblio File in France A recent fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Berlin) and visiting researcher at the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Centre-Européennes (Sorbonne-Paris IV), Daniel Medin joined the faculty of The American University of Paris in January 2010. He has taught German, English and comparative literature at Stanford University, Washington University in St...

Stephen Weiner is an award winning writer about comics & graphic novels. He has been writing about comics since 1992, and is the most recognized librarian responsible for promoting graphic novel collections in public libraries & bookstores. He is the director of the Maynard Public Library in Maynard, Massachusetts. His books include: 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, The 101 Best Graphic No...

John Ralston Saul was elected President of International PEN in October 2009 (his term ended in 2015). His award-winning essays and novels have had an impact on political and economic thought in many countries. Declared a "prophet" by TIME magazine, he is included in the prestigious Utne Reader's list of the world's 100 leading thinkers and visionaries. His works have been translated into 22 langu...

Series: Biblio File in France Economist Jean-Guy Boin is the former Director General of the International Bureau of French Publishing ( www.bief.org ), the international promotion organization of French books. He has held various positions in the book sector: teacher and trainer, researcher specializing in publishing economics, general administrator of a publishing house of literature and human sc...

Series: Biblio File in France Héloïse d'Ormesson is a French publisher who founded a publishing house that bears her name. She studied comparative literature at Yale University in the United States, where she landed her first job in publishing, and then returned to France to work at  Flammarion  as director of foreign literature, and subsequently as an editor at  Denoël ,  Laffont , and within the...

Series: Biblio File in France Pierre Astier and Laure Pecher are co-founders of their own eponymous literary and film agency . Pierre represents mainly French-speaking authors and publishers. After working in the art world for ten years, he created the quarterly short stories magazine  Le Serpent à Plumes in 1988. In 1993, together with Claude Tarrène, he set up a publishing house of the same name...

" Ashley Obscura is a Canadian-Mexican writer, publisher and editor. She is the author of the poetry collections  Ambient Technology  and  I Am Here  (Metatron, 2014) and four digital poetry projects: LIGHGHT, How to Be A Rainbow, Aura Halo and Oh, Inverted Universe. The founder and managing editor of Metatron Press , Obscura currently lives in Montreal, Quebec where she holds a Bachelor of Arts i...

Robert Weaver (1928–2008) was an influential, well-loved Canadian editor and broadcaster. He was born in Niagara Falls and educated at the University of Toronto, and worked at the CBC where he created a series of radio shows that featured then unknown Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen.   In 1956 Weaver founded The Tamarack R...

Glenn Horowitz is an agent in the sale and placement of culturally significant archives to research institutions throughout the United States. Authors, artists, musicians, designers, and photographers he has represented include Norman Mailer, James Salter, Deborah Eisenberg, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Grushkin, the Magnum Group, Nadine Gordimer, and Danny Fields. I met Glenn in...

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 bestsell...

" 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 a 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 "Wayward Glimpses"...

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...