The Shakespeare and Company Interview

M. John Harrison returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with Adam Biles about his new novel, The End of Everything, a disaster story set in a "wrong UK" where societal collapse coincides with the arrival of an alien presence, and the strange shape-shifting "artefacts" it leaves behind. Harrison discusses writing an "epistemological" catastrophe rather than a physical one, the decad...

Edward Chisholm joins Adam Biles to discuss Murder in Paris '68, his deep-dive into the Markovic Affair, one of the most explosive scandals of postwar France. In October 1968, the dismembered body of Stevan Markovic, a Yugoslav immigrant and bodyguard to Alain Delon, was found on the outskirts of Paris. The case implicated France's most iconic film star, the Corsican “milieu”, and eventually the É...

Recorded for Bloomsday 2026. If you're in Paris and it's still June 16th, join us between 2pm and 5pm at Shakespeare and Company, 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, Paris. Find the film here :   https://vimeo.com/408613317 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xAM_eXuuk Adam Biles and Lex Paulson reunite after an eighteen-month hiatus for a live commentary on the 1967 Joseph Strick film adaptation of Ulysses...

Tracy K. Smith comes to Shakespeare and Company for a conversation with Adam Biles. They discuss her book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times , a bold manifesto on poetry as a tool for deeper living, clearer thinking, and more compassionate citizenship. Drawing on her time as US Poet Laureate, Smith reflects on taking poetry to rural America, and how poems, unlike political debate, can open rather...

In the debut episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist and performer Taìno Mendez to discuss Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke, the twentieth title in the Faber Editions imprint. Published in 1965 and long out of print, the novel follows Oliver, a Black teenage...

Philosopher and author Lea Ypi joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company Paris to discuss her latest book Indignity: A Life Reimagined , an extraordinary work blending biography, history, and fiction. When a photo of her grandparents' 1941 honeymoon went viral in Albania, sparking online abuse, Ypi found herself compelled to investigate her grandmother Leman's life in full. The search took her i...

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review . Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-arundhati-roy Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, Adam Biles sits down with Arundhati Roy to discuss her memoir  Mother Mary Comes to Me . Roy reflects on writing a “nove...

Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription , a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection. Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Le...

Why Translate Homer Again? Daniel Mendelsohn on his new Odyssey This conversation explore’s Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Mendelsohn reflects on why this endlessly retranslated text still invites fresh interpretation, describing Odysseus as a “proto-author” whose storytelling shapes reality itself. The discussion delves into the craft of translation; balancing precision with...

In this special edition, we revisit three conversations with Shakespeare and Company rare book dealer Ben Brown, originally recorded in 2022. Across these episodes, Ben guides us into the fascinating, often mysterious world of book collecting. We begin with the basics: what makes a first edition and how collectors identify them. Ben shares insights into the thrill of the hunt and the appeal of own...

This week Adam Biles speaks with Tash Aw about The South , his novel of inheritance, identity, and quiet upheaval. Set on a decaying farm in southern Malaysia, the story follows a family confronting generational fracture, class tension, and the uneasy weight of belonging. Aw explores how landscape is felt through the body rather than described, and how memory—fragmentary and unreliable—shapes narr...

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review . Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalay This week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last th...

Recorded live in the bookshop, this conversation dives into the inventive world of Perspectives, Laurent Binet’s historical novel that transforms Renaissance Florence into the scene of a gripping whodunnit. The discussion explores how a real painter’s death becomes the catalyst for a dazzling literary experiment: a murder investigation told entirely through letters, gossip, and competing testimoni...

George Saunders returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with host Adam Biles about Vigil , his long-awaited new novel. Set on the threshold between life and death, Vigil follows a dying oil executive and the ghost tasked with comforting him, unfolding as a darkly comic, morally urgent meditation on guilt, responsibility, and free will in the age of climate collapse. Saunders discuss...

In this wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful conversation, writer Emily LaBarge speaks with host Adam Biles about Dog Days, her groundbreaking new work of nonfiction. Rooted in the 2009 hostage event she and her family survived while on holiday in the Caribbean, the book explores not the incident itself but the psychic “mark” it left—its shape, depth, and resistance to narrative. Emily discusses the...

In this episode, Adam Biles welcomes Jonathan Coe to Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a rich, funny, and wide-ranging conversation about Coe’s genre-bending novel The Proof of My Innocence . What begins as a playful pastiche of a cozy crime mystery evolves into three interlocking novellas—a whodunnit, a piece of dark academia, and a fragment of autofiction—that push at the limits of storytelli...

In this episode of the Shakespeare and Company Podcast, Adam Biles speaks with poet, translator and critic Ian Patterson about Books: A Manifesto , his passionate defence of reading in all its forms. What begins with the construction of a personal library in a converted coach house opens into a wide-ranging meditation on memory, loss, vulnerability and the profound role books play in shaping a lif...

In this live conversation at Shakespeare & Company in Paris, Adam Biles speaks with writer Ian Leslie about John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs , Leslie’s acclaimed exploration of the creative and emotional bond at the heart of The Beatles. Together they trace John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship from their first meeting as bereaved teenagers in Liverpool, through the crucible of H...

In this intimate conversation recorded at Shakespeare and Company, novelist Miriam Robinson joins Adam Biles to discuss her remarkable debut, And Notre Dame Is Burning. Together, they explore the novel’s fractured structure and the emotional aftermath of betrayal, loss, and motherhood. Robinson reflects on her protagonist Esther—a woman piecing together the wreckage of a marriage through letters a...

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review . Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-miriam-toews Trigger warning: This is a tender, funny, and hopeful conversation, that inevitably touches on the subjects of suicide and depression. Please be advised before listening. In this moving and intimate d...

In this episode recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, historian and cultural critic Andrew Hussey joins Adam Biles to discuss his powerful new book, Fractured France: A Journey Through a Divided Nation. With wit, erudition, and decades of on-the-ground insight, Hussey examines how France—once the model of revolutionary ideals and republican universalism—has splintered along social, cultural, a...

This week Adam Biles speaks with international lawyer and acclaimed author Philippe Sands about his latest book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. Building on East West Street and The Ratline, Sands traces the remarkable and disturbing links between Nazi officer Walter Rauff—architect of the mobile gas vans—and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Their con...

In this conversation recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, travel writer Monisha Rajesh talks about her new book Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train . From Paris to Istanbul, Scotland to India, the United States to Lapland, Rajesh explores the romance and realities of sleeper trains—where the carriages, the landscapes, and above all, the people become the story. She shares how h...

In this special episode of the Shakespeare and Company Interview Podcast, we celebrate the paperback release of The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews (Canongate), a compelling collection of literary conversations recorded live at our bookshop in Paris. Capturing a decade of rich, revealing discussions, the episode revisits unforgettable moments with some of the world’s most acclaimed writ...

In this episode Adam speaks with translator Frank Wynne and Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin about the first-ever English edition of Mafalda , the beloved Argentine comic strip by Quino (Archipelago Books). Together, they explore how this precocious, principled six-year-old girl—who challenged everything from soup to capitalism—shaped generations of readers in Argentina and beyond. Frank discu...