Episodes
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We’re working our way through the finalists for the 2024 Giller Prize. In Episode 2 of this three-episodeseries, we hear from: Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History), Jane Urquhart (In Winter I Get Up at Night), Corinna Chong (Bad Land), and Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts).
Listen to our conversations now.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
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The 2024 Giller longlist celebrates the best in Canadian fiction. Twelve titles were selected from 112 books published between Oct.1. 2023 and Aug. 16, 2024. In this mini-series, which is a departure from our usual format, you’ll hear readings from the nominated books and brief conversations with their authors.
In this first episode, Pamela is joined by: Caroline Adderson (A Way to be Happy), katherena vermette (real ones), and Loghan Paylor (The Cure for Drowning).
Listen to our conversations now.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Shaena Lambert has published two collections of short stories, The Falling Woman and Oh, my darling and two novels, Radiance and Petra and been nominated for literary prizes including the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. A Canadian with German heritage, she talks about echoes from the past and how the artistic legacy of her great-grandfather, grandfather, mother - and aunt, an 80-year-old burlesque dancer who was inducted into the Las Vegas Burlesque Hall of Fame - has left its mark on her.
While an activist in the Canadian Peace Movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Shaena met Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the Green Party in West Germany, and Petra’s lover, Gert Bastien, who accompanied her. After the shock of her death, Petra became the subject of Sheana’s second novel.
Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf, is the most recent collection of essays and short stories where you can find Shaena’s writing.
Listen to our conversation now.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Wiebke von Carolsfeld spent her childhood in West Berlin, studied Literature and Art History in Cologne, and apprenticed at the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witch shortly after they’d acquired the rights to The Satanic Verses. When she emigrated to Toronto, for language reasons, she shifted her aspirations to film. One of her early projects, Eisenstein, resulted in a nomination for Best Editing at the Genies.
Wiebke is one of only a handful of women in Canada who has directed three or more feature films. In 2002, she directed Marion Bridge, which starred Molly Parker and won Best First Canadian Feature at TIFF. She went on to direct Stay with Taylor Shilling and Aidan Quinn and The Saver, which won her a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2016 at the Canadian Screen Awards. The novel Claremont is Wiebke’s first book and it’s been optioned for a limited series on TV. She is currently at work on her next novel as well as the development of her next film, a thriller called Someone’s Daughter.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Behzad Karim Khani is an author whose explosive debut novel Hund, Wulf, Schakal (Dog, Wolf, Jackal) tells a story of violence on the streets of Berlin, and the lives of two immigrant brothers from Iran. It’s a book that elicited rave reviews such as this one in the Suddeutschezeitung: “Sentences you’d want to frame…simply a great work of literature.”
Behzad was a boy in Tehran when the Iran / Iraq war ended. With his family, he left and settled in Germany where his ethnicity marked him as an outsider. He grew up fast, fell in with gangs, and nearly went to prison for trafficking drugs. Things got better only when he moved to Berlin, got a job at a famous techno club, and became manager of the upscale restaurant next door where they welcomed guests like Quentin Tarantino and Karl Lagerfeld. Three years later he opened a bar of his own and began trying to write movie scripts. Eventually one the scripts turned into a novel and in 2022 he published Hund, Wolf, Schakal and won a nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann Award. In February, the book, which was adapted for the stage, premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theatre.
Behzad’s recommended reads:
Heinrich BöllPeter WeissChristian KrachtHow I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. She’s written four novels that have been translated into English, a memoir, several short stories, plays, and a few librettos, including the one she finished just before we spoke.
Jenny writes about growing up in East Berlin and how her experience of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) shaped her worldview. Her novel, The End of Days won the Hans Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize while Go, Went, Gone, which prompted the critic James Wood to predict that she would one day win the Nobel Prize, won the Thomas Mann Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker International. In May 2024, after this conversation was recorded, Jenny and her translator, Michael Hofmann, were the winners of the International Booker Prize for her latest novel, Kairos, about a love affair that crumbles while the East itself falls apart.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Andrea Wulf talks about gardens as windows into the politics, culture and science of a nation, why Alexander von Humboldt’s name belongs alongside Darwin, Einstein, and Newton; and how a group of young Germans in the small town of Jena introduced Romanticism and changed the world as we know it.
Andrea is an historian who was born in India, grew up in Germany, and now lives in the UK. In London, where - for the first time - she was exposed to the English obsession with gardening, her response was to co-write a book about it. Twenty years later, she’d tackled nature, astronomy, exploration, and 18th century philosophy.
Her books include This Other Eden, The Brother Gardeners, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, The Invention of Nature, and Magnificent Rebels. She is a winner of the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Award, and many other international awards.
Andrea’s recommended reads:
Juli ZehStefan ZweigHow I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jonathan Garfinkel is a Canadian playwright, poet, and novelist who lives in Berlin. He got his start in theatre in Georgia in the early 2000s under the tutelage of Paul Thompson . His plays include The Trials of John Demjhanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret, the controversial show about a man accused of being Ivan the Terrible; House of Many Tongues, which won him an nomination for a Governor Generals’ award, about the residents of a house in Gaza shared by an Israeli and a Palestinian; and Cockroach, adapted from the novel by Rawi Hage. Jonathan has also published essays, poetry, a memoir, and in 2023, his debut novel, In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark.
Jonathan’s recommended reads:
Nicholson Baker
Jenny Erpenbeck
Tilman Rammstedt
Nino Haratischwili
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Ivana Sajko is a Croatian artist whose work crosses from literature to dance, theatre to music and experimental performance. Despite coming of age during Croatia’s War of Independence, she rejected the impulse to write about it. Later, she realised it had nevertheless affected her and influences everything she writes.
Ivana moved to Berlin in 2016 where she continued to write plays, teach, and perform on stage. She finished Love Novel, which was translated into English and published in Canada in February 2024 and tells the story of a young couple trapped in the economic realities of late capitalism. An artist and a scholar who can’t provide for themselves sink further into desperation as the electricity is cut off, the neighbours come knocking, and the baby won’t stop crying. Love Novel won the HKW Literaturpreis in German and was shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award in English.
Ivana’s recommended reads:
Priya BasilClemens MeyerSivan Ben YishaiHow I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Julia Franck was born in 1970 in East Berlin in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), a part of Germany that, at the time, was behind the Iron Curtain. As a child, she fled with her mother to the West and lived for nine months in a refugee camp, where they were interrogated by agents of the secret police. Five years later, when she was just thirteen, she left her mother’s home and returned to Berlin, this time living on the Western side with friends.
Julia is the daughter of an actress and granddaughter of a sculptor whose family history has provided the backdrop for some of her most powerful books. The Blind Side of the Heart (called the Blindness of the Heart in the US), tells the story of a woman who abandons her son on a railway platform in 1945 after surviving the horrors of the Second World War. It was a story based on her own father’s childhood, a man she only met at the age of fourteen. The novel won the German Book Prize, the highest honour for literature in Germany, and went on to sell over a million copies. Two more of her books have been translated into English: Back to Back, based on her uncle’s life at the time when the Berlin Wall was being built; and West, which was adapted for the screen.
Julia’s recommended reads:
Herta Müller Katja OskampJudith HermannDana VowinckelHow I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Literary podcast How I Wrote This returns for Season 2. Join host Pamela Hensley for eight incredible conversations with (mostly) Berlin-based writers who have also published books in English. They include: Julia Franck, Ivana Sajko, Jonathan Garfinkel, Wiebke von Carolsfeld, Andrea Wulf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Behzad Karim Khani, and Shaena Lambert.
Season 2 premieres April 23, 2024 with new episodes dropping every Tuesday.
How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley
Presented by Knockabout Media.
Original music by Tyler K. Rauman
Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.
Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.
Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the doctrine but because she felt herself more moved by Middlemarch than the Bible. In 2018, after attending one of the Banff Centre’s writing workshops, she started working on the stories that became the collection called End Times.
Listen to our conversation to hear how Michelle wrote this book while grappling with a culture she still didn’t fully understand.
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H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature.
When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Quebec where he studied African American Literature, earning degrees from Concordia, McGill and Université de Montréal. He became a high school teacher then a professor before publishing his first novel, Spirits in the Dark. Nigel is the editor of Kola Magazine, host of the Lectures Logos reading series, has twice been shortlisted for the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, won the 2013 Universite Laval Homage aux Createurs, the 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, the 2021 QWF Judy Mappin Community Award, and in 2022 the Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize.
Throughout his career, Nigel has written about and supported the Black and gay communities in his adopted country. Learn more in our delightful conversation.
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Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art.
Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translated into several languages, most recently Russian. In 2015, he published his first novel, Boo, about a boy in the afterlife and the following year was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Geneviève Pettersen’s novel La déesse des mouches à feu into The Goddess of Fireflies.
In this candid and highly personal conversation, Neil talks about his latest novel, Jones, the heartbreaking tale about a troubling childhood that he describes as 75% true.
Trigger warning: sexual abuse / suicide
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Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec.
Until the age of ten, Kim lived a relatively privileged life in Saigon. But when the war in Vietnam ended, the Communists took over and her family decided there was no alternative but to flee. They boarded a wooden boat and made it to Malaysia where they lived in a refugee camp before moving to Quebec.
Kim went on to study linguistics and law, opened a restaurant, and became one of Canada’s most beloved authors. Her debut novel, Ru, won many prizes and awards including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and Canada Reads, and was adapted to a film that premiered this September at TIFF. Ru was followed by three more novels, Man, Vi, and Em, as well as a children’s picture book, a cookbook, and contributions to non-fiction.
Hear Kim’s incredible story in this sweeping conversation that spans the years from her life in Vietnam up to the present day.
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Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country.
Just four years after moving to Quebec, Baharan published Prophetess and won the 2022 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. In lyrical prose, she captures the story of a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime against her sister. The girl goes into shock, becomes mute, and develops strange physical reactions to men as she begins to recognize - then later act on - the oppression in this world.
Listen to find out more about Baharan’s journey and why she is writing her next book in French.
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Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life.
Sean emigrated from Scotland at the age of five, grew up in Ottawa, and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. While still a student, he created Said the Gramophone, an mp3 music blog that would later be rated by Time Magazine as one of the top 25 blogs in the world. After spending years on a novel that was never published, he wrote Us Conductors and in 2014 won the biggest literary prize in Canada. He claimed it was lucky and went on to write a novel about luck, The Wagers, while writing columns for the Guardian and The Globe and Mail and the occasional article for Rolling Stone.
Find out more in our conversation and learn about his latest novel, Do You Remember Being Born?, in which a poet collaborates with AI.
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Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation of America.
Mikhail was born in Leningrad in the ‘50s. The son of a prominent scientist, his application for leaving his country was refused and his education all but wasted when he quit his engineering job to become a security guard at an amusement park. At the age of 30, he finally made it to the US just before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Despite his rudimentary English, he was accepted to study Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire and before long, his short stories were published in literary journals and he assembled his first collection, Every Hunter Wants to Know. Today he is a professor at Concordia University and a contributor to magazines like the New Yorker. He is also a founder and Creative Director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program where friends such as George Saunders and Francine Prose have acted as faculty.
Listen to here to our lively and fascinating conversation.
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Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing.
Anita moved to Calgary in 1991 when her husband was pursuing a Master’s degree at the university. Already a journalist, she enrolled in a creative writing program and began the manuscript for the novel that became Tamarind Mem. Four years later she published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, which was a regional winner for the Commonwealth Prize, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin and the Orange Prize for Fiction, and a contender for Canada Reads. Can you Hear the Nightbird Call and Tell it to the Trees were the two books that followed when she moved to Montreal.
Anita’s writing was recognized by the Writers’ Trust when she won the Marian Engel Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize administrators when she was asked to chair the jury in 2017. Listen to our delightful conversation here.
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Heather is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. In 2006 she published her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which critics called “hypnotic” and praised for depicting “the most sympathetic abusive father in literature”. It won the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Governor Generals’ Award, and when it won the Canada Reads competition in 2007, it catapulted Heather to literary stardom. She has since published The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, a collection of stories called Daydreams of Angels, and two more novels, The Lonely Hearts Hotel and When We Lost Our Heads.
In this entertaining conversation, learn more about Heather’s early life and a hint of what’s to come in her next novel, her first to depart from Montreal.
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