The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Laura Claridge  has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently the story of an American icon,  Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners , for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, administered by the Nieman Foundation...

Barabara Slate is "an artist, cartoonist, graphic novelist, comic book creator, and writer. She is one of the few female artists who has created, written, and drawn comics for both DC and Marvel Comics."   In 1986 Barbara created 'Angel Love' for DC Comics, an adult-themed series for teenagers. In an exhibition review, The New York Times described her art as "emphatically of our time with its narr...

James Daunt is the founder of the  Daunt Books  chain, and since May 2011 has been managing director of the bookshop chain  Waterstones .  In June 2019, he became the CEO of the US bookstore chain  Barnes & Noble , acquired by Waterstones's parent, Elliott Advisors for $683m. We met last year in London to discuss Waterstones's impressive turn-around. We met last week in a small room (with apologie...

Leslie Hurtig was born into a house of books and has had a long, successful career in Canada's book industry. She has worked for some of Canada's best bookstores, acted as a sales representative and publicist for some of North America's great publishers, and worked as a foreign rights and contracts manager at Raincoast Books. Leslie sat on the Board of Directors for the Vancouver Writers Fest befo...

Bruce Fye   is an American retired cardiologist, medical historian, writer, bibliophile and philanthropist. He is emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, and was the founding director of the institution's W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine, named by the Clinic in his honour as a result of his philanthropy. In addition to building up a large colle...

Christopher Lyons , is the head librarian of rare books and special collections at McGill University's McLennan Library. He was formerly in charge of  McGill's Osler Library which holds the collection of it's founder, Sir William Osler (1849–1919). A major figure in modern medical history, Osler is "well known as a scientific researcher, a great medical pedagogue, a humanist, and an advocate for a...

Ambassador Bruce Heyman is an American businessman and served as  United States Ambassador to Canada  under Barack Obama from 2014 until 2017. He appears regularly on CBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, CTV, CNBC, and other media outlets as an expert on trade and bilateral issues. Bruce lives in Chicago with his wife and co-author Vicki Heyman who was an American cultural envoy in Canada, leading cross-...

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...

David Moscrop is a political theorist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He studies democratic deliberation, political decision-making, and digital media, and is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, and a writer for Maclean's Magazine  He also provides regular political commentary for television and radio. His first book Too D...

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 activ...

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, 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. Ken is a former P...