The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

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...

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'.

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.

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. 

Dr. Don Nichol is an English Professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. He has been researching copyright law and its role in the history of writing and publishing for more than a decade. He is the author of Pope's Literary Legacy, published by the Oxford Bibliographical Society in 1992, and editor, more recently, of The New Foundling Hospital for Wit 1768-1773 , a three-volume set...

Fran Durako is owner of the Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore, Maryland. We talk here about her love of William Morris , fine printing and Victorian book illustration, the transition from book collector to seller, and art as a 'positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to.' 

Acclaimed Canadian novelist and critic David Gilmour was born in London, Ontario in 1949. His first novel, Back on Tuesday , was published in 1986, followed by How Boys See Girls in 1991 and An Affair with the Moon in 1993. Lost Between Houses , published in 1999, was nominated for the Trillium Book Award. Sparrow Nights , his fifth novel, was published by Random House to rave reviews. His latest...

Martin Levin was for 17 years the popular (particularly at Book Expo Canada where we met) Books Editor at the (Toronto) Globe and Mail newspaper, and, according to Dennis Johnson, founder of MobyLives and co-founder/co-publisher of Melville House, one of the most esteemed in the business.   We talk here about namesakes in Tolstoy, guilt, tragedy, sorrow at not being able to review anywhere near al...

  Jamie Byng is Publisher at Canongate Books, an independent publishing firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Thanks in part to his tireless efforts, and the huge success of its Booker-winning novel Life Of Pi , Canongate won Publisher Of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2003. It won again in 2009. Jamie is also the originator, and (was) first Chair of World Book Night.  In 2005 he launched the...

Interview with used antiquarian book dealer Peter Ellis at his shop on Cecil Court Road in London, England. 

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. He has served as both president of the Poetry Society (UK) and as Poetry Editor at The New Yorker magazine.  He was in Ottawa, C...

Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott read at the Blue Metropolis Writers Festival in Montreal several weeks ago. We talk here about England, parents, Ted Hughes, William Blake, combining painting and poetry, the sea, getting laid, and the theme of returning. In addition to experiencing him as an articulate, moving communicator, I also found Derek Walcott to be, like many great men, humble and ap...

Gill Coleridge is a partner with Rogers, Coleridge & White , one of the top literary agencies in the world. I spoke with her at the 2006 London Bookfair about how discounting squeezes authors; about the role of the literary agent, how she champions her stable of writers, her bets on hot new literary talent (Peter Hobbs, Adam Thirlwell, Phil Lamarshe, Louise Dean, Jim Younger), plus her thoughts ab...

Neil Wilson is a former journalist/broadcaster, future publisher, current long-distance runner and founding director of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, considered "one of Canada's greatest literary festivals." We talk about his love of Irish literature and poetry, his founding of the Festival in 1997, what motivates him to do what he does, and this Spring's impressive, Beckett-backed li...

Here is my interview with Stephen Page (unparalleled name for a man in his position) CEO and Publisher of Faber and former British Publishers Association President, conducted hurriedly at the 2006 London Book Fair. We talk briefly about the role and necessity of publishing houses, the impact of the Internet, discounting, supermarkets, ebooks, and 3 for 2 band-aids.   

Rap as rebellion, slang as hipness, and jargon as obfuscatory exclusionary pretense. These are topics discussed during my interview with world-renowned slang lexicographer Jonathon Green last month at his home office in London, England. And bloody invigorating it was too. We talk about why penises are funny and beat out vaginas, why slang is negative and misogynist and how it carries a kind of inv...

The Rockcliffe Park Book Fair is one of the oldest, biggest, best used-book sales in Ontario, if not Canada. It's a veritable institution. Book dealers travel across the country every year to cash in on the great deals. More than 3500 volunteer hours go into the making of it annually (other schools boast when they get six hundred over the course of a year). Twenty six thousand books were sold last...

I've known  Kensel Tracy for 20 years. We met in 1985 when he was in charge of marketing at the Ottawa-Carleton Tourism Commission and I was Membership Director at the Board of Trade. I can't think of anyone I've ever met who is quite as energetic and creative. Kensel is a true marketer. Over the years he has worked with Ottawa's Festival of Spring, Winterlude, Habitat for Humanity and many other...