C.S. Richardson

My guest on this episode is C.S. Richardson. C.S. Richardson is an award-winning book designer who worked in book publishing for more than forty years, and an author whose first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller, published in fourteen countries and ten languages, and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean). His second novel, The Emperor of Paris, was a national bestseller, named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the year, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize. His most recent book is the novel All the Colour in the World, published in 2023 by Knopf Canada. That book was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. The Toronto Star called it “a heady celebration of art, an act and form the author respects in all its facets.”

C.S.—it’s Charles Scott, by the way—and I talk about the reason for the decade-long gap between his second and third novels, about the advantages and disadvantages that come with writing a novel while working deep in the heart of publishing, and how retiring to become a full-time writer has allowed him to push his creative ambitions even further.

My 2012 profile of C.S. Richardson in Toronto Life.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

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