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Today on Writers & Company - A special program with Nigerian Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka. He talks about the political life of his country, his years in prison without trial, and the connections between European and African literature.

The endless winter of discontent continues in Greece, as the country struggles through its sixth straight year of severe recession. It's a time of political and social disintegration that has not been experienced in Greece since the German occupation of World War II, followed by the Civil War, and later, the brutal period of military rule. Three years of harsh austerity measures have led to the highest rate of unemployment in the EU, with an unstable government and the disturbing rise of the…

The endless winter of discontent continues in Greece, as the country struggles through its sixth straight year of severe recession. Three years of harsh austerity measures have led to the highest rate of unemployment in the EU, with an unstable government and the disturbing rise of the extreme-right party Golden Dawn. Eleanor Wachtel has travelled to Athens to speak with a variety of the country's top writers and thinkers about their work and lives, and the atmosphere in the stricken nation…

This week on Writers & Company, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with Philip Pullman, author of the fantasy fiction trilogy, His Dark Materials. Their conversation touches on the topics of innocence and experience, Greek myth, religion and adventure. The author reads from book one of the trilogy, The Golden Compass, which has been made into a new film.

This week on Writers and Company, it's part two of Eleanor Wachtel's conversation with England's Philip Pullman. They explore science, religion, fantasy and a mysterious substance called Dust. The program also features the author's own reading from the audio book of his award-winning third novel The Amber Spyglass from the His Dark Materials trilogy.

This week on Writers and Company, Canadian poet, essayist, Greek and Latin scholar, and librettist, Anne Carson. The author of Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband has produced yet another surprising and haunting book, called Nox. It's an elegy to her brother, an epitaph as she calls it, a notebook of memories and fragments. A moving reflection on absence. As she writes in her first entry: I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is…

From the face that launched a thousand ships, to the gaze that turned men to stone – the women of Greek myths are the subject of Natalie Haynes's latest book, Pandora's Jar: Women in Greek Myths. If you've ever wondered whether Helen really started the Trojan War, or how Medusa got a head full of snakes, or what Pandora's box was all about, Haynes is the person to ask. The British classicist, novelist and stand-up comedian goes back to the ancient original sources to rediscover these and…

Eleanor Wachtel interviews Salman Rushdie. The novelist and essayist who has put his opinions - and even his life - on the line, has a new collection of essays called Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002.

Host Eleanor Wachtel talks with Jeffrey Eugenides, creator of the most original coming-of-age stories, from the award-winning The Virgin Suicides to the recent Middlesex. Middlesex is about a hermaphrodite, but it couldn't be less sensational or more, in its way, old-fashioned.