Writers & Company

Writers & Company, CBC's flagship literary program, broadcast weekly for more than 30 years. Host Eleanor Wachtel conducts hour-long, intimate, in-depth interviews with exceptional writers—novelists, poets, essayists, dramatists, biographers and critics—as well as filmmakers, artists, and thinkers from around the world. Special attention is paid to their background and personal experience, as it relates to their work. The long format also allows for consideration of the writer's oeuvre and connecting themes. A reading is often part of the conversation.

This includes 14 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, often before they received the recognition of the Nobel committee, and then engaging with them afterwards as well. At the same time, the program has featured new voices, writers who went on to become established names in the literary world. Alongside regular programming, Writers & Company produced the 25 special series—interviews recorded in the field, with authors and artists in different countries and cultures, from India to Argentina, from Aotearoa New Zealand to Sri Lanka.

The entire collection of Writers & Company episodes are now available. 

The media is available for Internet Streaming. Internet Downloading is prohibited. 

Writers & Company is a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. © All rights reserved. 1990-2023

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You Must Change Your Life': Biographer Rachel Corbett on Rilke and Rodin

Date: 2016-12-04
Name(s): Corbett, Rachel, 1984-, Rabinovitch, Sandra, Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Eleanor speaks with biographer Rachel Corbett about the unlikely - and influential - friendship between German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Zadie Smith on dance, Black British identity, and her new novel, Swing Time

Date: 2016-11-13
Name(s): Rabinovitch, Sandra, Smith, Zadie, Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Eleanor speaks with one of fiction's most exciting voices, British novelist Zadie Smith. The beloved author of White Teeth and NW has a new novel, Swing Time - about fame, female friendship, and tap dancing.

Zadie Smith on her essay collection, Changing My Mind

Date: 2010-02-28
Name(s): Smith, Zadie, Stinson, Mary (Producer), Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Eleanor Wachtel in conversation with the dynamic, young author Zadie Smith. The author of the bestselling hits White Teeth and On Beauty, has a new book of essays about writing, about her addiction to reading, and about her family. Changing My Mind is published by Hamish Hamilton Canada.

Zadie Smith on her novel, NW

Date: 2012-10-07
Name(s): Smith, Zadie, Stinson, Mary (Producer), Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Acclaimed English writer, Zadie Smith. The author of White Teeth and On Beauty has a new novel, NW, set in her home turf in London. Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Zadie Smith onstage in front of a sold-out audience at Harbourfront in Toronto.

Zadie Smith on what keeps her urgently engaged with the world around her

Date: 2019-11-17
Name(s): Rabinovitch, Sandra, Smith, Zadie, Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Critically acclaimed British author Zadie Smith joined Eleanor Wachtel onstage in Toronto for an exhilarating conversation about Grand Union, her first collection of short stories.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty

Date: 2005-10-30
Name(s): Smith, Zadie, Stinson, Mary (Producer), Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: This week on Writers & Company, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with English author Zadie Smith. The dynamic, young author of the best-selling hit, White Teeth, has a rich new novel, called On Beauty.

Zambian-American novelist Namwali Serpell on death, dreams and the haunting nature of grief in her new novel, The Furrows

Date: 2022-10-23
Name(s): Serpell, Namwali, Swailes, Katy, Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Zambian-American writer Namwali Serpell's 2019 novel The Old Drift was hailed by Salman Rushdie as "a dazzling debut." It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Time magazine, The Atlantic and NPR. Her time-bending new work, The Furrows, takes a deep dive into love and loss, memory and mourning.

Zimbabwe's Petina Gappah casts new light on David Livingstone's search for the source of the Nile

Date: 2020-05-10
Name(s): Gappah, Petina, 1971-, Stinson, Mary (Producer), Wachtel, Eleanor
Description: Zimbabwean author Petina Gappah spoke to Eleanor Wachtel about her novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, which re-imagines the 19th-century explorer and missionary David Livingstone through the eyes of his many African companions. Focusing on the African companions, servants and enslaved people who took Livingstone's body from present-day Zambia, where he died in 1873, to Zanzibar, the novel is a moving exploration of power, violence and resilience in pre-colonial Africa.