How I Wrote This

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 Tyle...

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 ...

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, grandfa...

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.&nbs...

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 ...

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 Fall...

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 e...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 eve...

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 p...

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 beca...

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 Crunc...

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 ...

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 ...

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 create...

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...

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 ...