Writers & Company

Writers & Company debuted on CBC Radio in October 1990. While originally conceived as an arts magazine show, under executive producer Anne Gibson, it soon evolved into a program devoted to international writing, drawing on the interests and strengths of Wachtel and founding producer Sandra Rabinovitch. At the time it was unusual to dedicate a full hour to a long-form interview with one author, but the format proved rewarding for both listeners and guests, who appreciated the close reading and intelligent discussion of their work.

A distinguishing feature of Writers & Company interviews is the attention paid to the writer's 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.

Writers & Company was broadcast for several years on Minnesota Public Radio, and interviews from the program were also broadcast, in abridged form, in the Friday night slot of The Arts Tonight.

Sandra Rabinovitch and Mary Stinson have been the program's long-time producers.

Host Eleanor Wachtel has been described as a "national treasure" for the intelligence, sensitivity, warmth and humour that she brings to her interviews. With informed questions and thoughtful responses, she's able to draw out the stories of even the most reticent guests, while illuminating their work.

Wachtel began her broadcasting career in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition to her featured role on Writers & Company, she was the host of CBC Stereo's The Arts Today from 1996 to 2007, and she also created and hosted Wachtel on the Arts, broadcast monthly on CBC Radio's Ideas, from 2007 to 2017. The show featured high-profile artists, architects, composers, filmmakers, theatre and opera directors, actors, singers, conductors and choreographers from Canada and around the world.

Wachtel has received nine honorary degrees from universities across Canada and was promoted from Member to Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014.

From its inception, Writers & Company has featured interviews with leading fiction writers, poets, essayists, dramatists, filmmakers, biographers and critics. From Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Ryszard Kapuściński and Mavis Gallant, to Hilary Mantel, Amos Oz, Louise Erdrich, Zadie Smith and Yiyun Li, the program's guests have included many of the most exciting names in contemporary literature, both established and upcoming.

Fourteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature have appeared on Writers & Company, often more than once, and before they were awarded the prize: Saul Bellow, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro and Abdulrazak Gurnah.

Themed panel discussions, featuring several guests and often produced in connection with literary festivals, are also periodically broadcast on the program.

In addition to the high-profile individual interviews that distinguish Writers & Company, the program has regularly featured special series recorded on location around the world. The 25 series, produced by Sandra Rabinovitch, have sent Wachtel to such places as Israel on its 50th anniversary, Berlin 10 years after the fall of the Wall, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, Germany during the refugee crisis, Brazil and more.

With titles such as "Reinventing India: Writing Since Independence" (1998), "Writing in the World of Islam" (2002), "Maori Renaissance: New Zealand Re-imagined" (2003), "Memory and Myth: The Rebirth of Central Europe" (2005), "Franco’s Ghosts: The Remaking of Spain" (2011) and "Darkness and Light: The Nordic Imagination" (2018), the timely and topical special series have expanded the range of the program and been praised by listeners for the insight they offer into other cultures.

On one of her more dramatic excursions in the field, Wachtel was in Santiago, Chile, during the 2010 earthquake – and managed to report as well as record her interviews, during extensive aftershocks.

The wide-ranging, thematic series "Original Minds," broadcast in 2001, at the turn of the millennium, featured conversations with influential figures who have made a difference. These included Jonathan Miller, Amartya Sen, Jane Goodall, Desmond Tutu, Arthur C. Clarke, Susan Sontag, Jane Jacobs, Bernardo Bertolucci, Harold Bloom, Umberto Eco and Gloria Steinem. The series was published in the 2003 collection titled Original Minds (HarperCollins).

Wachtel is frequently invited to conduct onstage interviews at literary events, which are recorded for broadcast on Writers & Company. She has appeared at the University of Alberta's Festival of Ideas in Edmonton, UBC Connects in Vancouver, the Banff Centre, the reading series of the Toronto Public Library, and at literary festivals including the Toronto International Festival of Authors, the Vancouver Writers Festival, Kingston WritersFest, the Ottawa International Writers Festival, the Victoria Writers Festival, Calgary’s WordFest and Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival.

Writers & Company has also recorded interviews at international literary festivals such as Sri Lanka's Galle Literary Festival, India's Jaipur International Literature Festival, the Hay Festival Cartagena in Colombia, the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing, the Istanbul Tanipar Literature Festival, the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland, and the SHIFT festival of Canadian and Dutch Arts in Amsterdam.

A selection of interviews from the program, titled Writers & Company, was published in 1993 (Knopf Canada, Houghton Mifflin in the U.S.), followed by More Writers & Company in 1996 (Knopf Canada). Original Minds, with interviews from the special series, was published in 2003 by HarperCollins. Random Illuminations (2007, GooseLane), a collection of reflections, correspondence and conversations with Carol Shields (many recorded for Writers & Company), won the Independent Publisher Book Award. In 2016, in celebration of the program’s 25th anniversary, The Best of Writers & Company was published by Biblioasis.

Selected interviews throughout the years have been published, by permission, in journals such as Queen’s Quarterly, Prism and Brick: A Literary Journal.

In 2002, Wachtel won the Jack Award for the promotion of Canadian books and authors.

Writers & Company twice won the coveted CBC Award for Programming Excellence for the best weekly show broadcast nationally. In 1995, the judges noted that if they had to choose one hour of radio to take to a desert island, it would be Writers & Company. The program also won the CBC Excellence award in 2003.

In 2011, Writers & Company was awarded a New York Festivals Prize for the World's Best Radio Programs.

In the words of Kazuo Ishiguro, "Eleanor Wachtel is one of the very finest interviewers of authors I've come across anywhere in the world."

At the end of their conversation in 2013, John le Carre told Wachtel, "You do it better than anyone I know."

"[Eleanor Wachtel is] the best. Her kind of talk is so rare, where you feel you are having a real intellectual discussion and are finding out new things – about yourself, the [writing] process, everything." - George Saunders

"The best interviewer around, and I’ve known many." - Julian Barnes

"I really do mean it, you're the best... you have such a lovely manner and you're so incredibly well prepared. I really do appreciate that." - Jonathan Franzen

“This book [Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields] isn’t presented as biography, but it seems to me to do just what the most discerning biography should do; that is, to give us a clear and lively and responsible and, yes, illuminating revelation of a writer's life and thought." - Alice Munro

The opening theme for Writers & Company is "Long as You Know You're Living Yours" by Keith Jarrett, from the album Belonging. Closing music is carefully chosen for each week's program to reflect the tone and content of the interview.

• Writers & Company