The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

John Bid­well is Astor Cur­ator of Prin­ted Books and Bind­ings at the Pier­pont Mor­gan Lib­rary , before which he was Cur­ator of Graphic Arts in the Prin­ceton Uni­ver­sity Lib­rary. He has writ­ten extens­ively on the his­tory of paper­mak­ing in Eng­land and America.  The Prin­ted Books and Bind­ings col­lec­tion at the Mor­gan con­tains works span­ning West­ern book pro­duc­tion from the ear...

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet before James l came to the throne. Events in the play reflect many of the real world concerns that  Englishmen had about being ruled by a foreigner. At the play's end, Denmark's line of  rulers is extinguished, and a foreigner (Fortinbras) takes the throne. James was married to Anna of Denmark, some feared that if he were to attempt a military takeover, he might call on th...

Crime novelist Denise Mina is the author of a trilogy of novels set in Glasgow: Garnethill (1998), which won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger; Exile (2000); and Resolution (2001).     Sanctum (2002), is the story of a forensic psychiatrist, convicted of killing a serial killer. The Field of Blood (2005) is the first in a new series, the second in the series, The Dead Hou...

Terry Griggs is the author of a collection of short stories,  Quickening , which was nominated for a Governor General's Award, and two novels, The Lusty Man , and Rogues' Wedding , shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award. She has also written two books for children, Cat's Eye Corner , shortlisted for a Mr. Christie's Book Award and a Red Cedar Award, and most recently a sequel, The...

Karl Siegler is a founding member of the Association of Book Publishers of British C olumbia and the Literary Press Group of Canada ; he has served as president of the Association of Canadian Publishers twice, and was one of the founding members of the Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. He's also the publisher at Talonbooks. Talonbooks has publishe...

Ha Jin was born in China in 1956. After Tiananmen Square, he emigrated to the United States. Unlike most exiled writers Ha Jin was not established in his native language; he had no audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English.   He has published three collections of poetry, including Between Silences and Facing Shadows , and three collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words , received th...

This past Spring at the Blue Met Writers Festival , Donald Antrim conducted a workshop entitled: Fiction and Memoir: "Writing Ourselves" It was designed to explore the 'challenging and often frustrating process of reading into one's own work;' and to identify aspects of that work which may have been underdeveloped, unnoticed, or even, avoided. As the syllabus put it: "Fiction and memoir are not, a...

Rohan Maitzen has an Honours B.A. in English and History from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. and Ph. D. in English from Cornell University.  Since 1995 she has been a member of Dalhousie University's English Department. Her main teaching area is the Victorian novel; she has a particular admiration for George Eliot and assigns her greatest novel, Middlemarch , whenever possible. I h...

Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Robert Bringhurst is an award winning Canadian poet, typographer and author. Perhaps best known for  The Elements of Typographic Style – a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type, he is also a respected translator of poetic works from Haida into English.  He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, B.C. We met in Ottawa...

A.B. Yehoshua was born in 1936 to a fifth-generation Jerusalem family of Sephardi origin. His first book of stories, "Mot Hazaken" (The Death of the Old Man) was published in 1962. He was an important member of the "new wave" generation of Israeli writers who differed from earlier writers by focusing on the individual rather than the group.  Franz Kafka , Shmuel Yosef Agnon , and William Faulkner...

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to Canada in 1978, he attended MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in theoretical nuclear physics. From 1978-1980 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Atomic Energy of Canada, and from 1980 to 1989 he was a research associate at the University of Toronto. During this period he developed a keen interest i...

This from Contemporary Writers : " Zoe Heller was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford University and Columbia University, New York.  She is a journalist who, after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature writer for The Independent.  She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph and earned the title...

Nino Ricci's first novel, the best-selling Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim and a host of awards, including, in Canada, the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and in England, the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize.  It was followed by In A Glass House and Where She Has Gone, which completed the trilogy that Lives of the Saints...

Margaret MacMillan was educated at the University of Toronto and at Oxford, where she obtained a B. Phil. in politics and a D. Phil. for a thesis on the British in India between 1880 and 1920. Her books include Women of the Raj, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the 2003 Governor General's Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize...

Meir Shalev  one of Israel's most celebrated novelists, was born in 1948 in Nahalal, Israel's first moshav. He is a bestselling author in Israel, Holland, and Germany; and he has been translated into more than twenty languages. His novels include A Pigeon and a Boy, Fontanelle, Alone In the Desert, But A Few Days, and Esau. Russian Romance (The Blue Mountain) is one of the top five bestsellers in...

Clarke's Bookshop, the most famous in Cape Town, specializes in selling southern African books to universities and libraries that teach and have an interest in same. Established in 1956 by Anthony Clarke, the Long Street shop today remains much the same as it was 50 plus years ago:  filled with book-lined, wooden-floored rooms spread over two levels containing an eclectic mix of new and used, rare...

Crime novelist, film director, children's author and award-winning journalist, Margie Orford was born in London and grew up in Namibia and South Africa. She has studied under J M. Coetzee, and worked in publishing with the African Publishers Network. In 1999 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and while in New York she worked on a groundbreaking archival retrieval project, WOMEN WRITING AFRICA...

In a conversation I had with him, Canadian critic, editor and short story writer John Metcalf hauls off on both the Giller Prize and two-time winner M.G. Vassanji;  the former for boosterism and an inability to distinguish between good and bad literature (for placing two-time winner Alice Munro in the same category as Vassanji), and the latter for being a person who, 'there's no question,' can't "...

Open Letter is the University of Rochester's literary publishing house. ' It is dedicated to connecting readers with great international authors and their works. Publishing twelve books a year and running an online literary website called Three Percent , Open Letter is one of only a handful of U.S. organizations with a commitment to cultivating an appreciation for international literature.' 'Chad...

Damon Galgut is a writer based in Cape Town.  He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season (1984), when he was seventeen. Small Circle of Beings (1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), the story of a young white man on military service who suffers a nervous breakdown. The Quarry (1995), was made into a film by a Belgian production company. The G...

This from contemporary writers : One of South Africa's most distinguished writers, André Brink was born in 1935. Poet, novelist, essayist and teacher, he began work as a University lecturer in Afrikaans and Dutch Literature in the 1960s. He began writing in Afrikaans, but when censored by the South African government, began to also write in English and became published overseas. He remains a key f...

Stephen Johnson is Managing Director of the South African publishing firm Random House Struik. We talk here about the merger, the independence of SABC (the state owned South African Broadcasting Corporation), Cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro , Random House Struik's political power, Apartheid's banning of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty , the current government's under-funding of libraries, political corrupt...

I interviewed Canadian critic/editor/writer John Metcalf on his love of Books and Book Collecting. The same afternoon we also talked about the process of book reviewing, whether or not the use of insult and/or invective is ever justified and if so, when. John is known as a 'blunt' critic; one who tells his un-sugared truths directly, who is not reticent to attack 'with savagery' books he feels 'in...

JENNY HOBBS is a novelist and freelance journalist who lives in Franschhoek, South Africa. She is the author of four novels, Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, The Sweet-Smelling Jasmine, The Telling of Angus Quain , and Video Dreams , four non-fiction books, and short stories published and broadcast locally and by the BBC. She reviewed books for many years and has written for and worked on TV book...

Dawn Arnold is Chair of the Frye Festival in Moncton, New Brunswick. Jane Urquhart, Wayne Johnston, Neil Smith, Alexandre Jardin and Miriam Toews are among the many authors who will participate in this year's ten day event. Dawn and I talk here about the history of the Festival, Northrop Frye's thoughts on imagination and new worlds, the benefits to children of learning more than one language, how...