Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA Podcast
1) Seamus Heaney: Death of a Naturalist
Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney reads some of his best-known poems in a 1990 performance in front of a Toronto crowd as part of the Harbourfront Reading Series (now called Toronto International...Show More
2) Carlos Fuentes: From Illusion to Reality
Bob Rae talks to Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, in Toronto in 2000.
3) Ursula Le Guin: Don't Push the River
American Sci-fi / Speculative Fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Marilyn Powell (CBC Ideas) in Toronto in 2000.
4) Saul Bellow: Wires not Roots
American Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow talks to former Canadian Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, in a conversation recorded in 1988.
5) Jamaica Kincaid: Brothers, Mothers and Antigua
The best kinds of conversations should meander and detour, trip over delicate areas, double down when a point must be emphatically asserted. After all, the ostensible subject of this 1997 on-stage cha...Show More
6) Mario Vargas Llosa: Literature Can Help People Live
What's the role of the artist in the contemporary political life of a country? A conversation between Mario Vargas Llosa and Adrienne Clarkson recorded in 1988 in Toronto, part of the Toronto Internat...Show More
7) Hilary Mantel: Experiments in Love
Hilary Mantel's sudden death in 2022 at the age of 70 shocked the literary world and fans of her Wolf Hall Trilogy, which was a publishing phenomenon. In this wide-ranging conversation recorded in Tor...Show More
8) Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
There is a predictable story arc that occurs after an author dies young: their work, their reputation gets renewed, debates rage about the legacy that this tragic figure will leave behind. Think of Da...Show More
9) Austin Clarke: Sometimes, A Motherless Child
Austin Clarke was a writer who was long fascinated by how we are both nurtured by and damaged by the communities that surround us - and most particularly how Caribbean and West Indian communities in m...Show More
10) Doris Lessing: Homage to the New Man
It’s easy to forget when one sees how ubiquitous the “author reading” has become that there was a time when this custom was practically unheard of. Writers are, after all, often introverted, timid - e...Show More