Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives

Oct 16 2024 27 ep. 29 mins 82

Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives Podcast artwork

A monthly series produced and curated by Toronto Public Library (TPL), celebrating the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA). Episodes feature recorded on-stage interviews, readings or panel discussions with some of the 20th century's best-known writers and thinkers. Hosted by novelist, Randy Boyagoda.

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Mario Vargas Llosa: Literature Can Help People Live

Oct 16 2024 49 mins

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 International Festival of Authors Archives.

Hilary Mantel: Experiments in Love

Sep 18 2024 48 mins

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 Toronto in 1997, Mantel's best-known works were yet to come and as Randy Boyagoda notes in the introduction, you as a listener wish you could reach in and tell her that her peak as a writ

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

Oct 15 2020 36 mins

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 David Foster Wallace, for example. Love his work or hate it, his massive tomes are still written about, debated, dialogued upon as if we can gain insight into who he was and find portent

Austin Clarke: Sometimes, A Motherless Child

Sep 24 2020 42 mins

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 mid-20th century Toronto both nurtured and damaged young Black men. In this reading, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1991, Clarke reads the final story from hi

Doris Lessing: Homage to the New Man

Sep 10 2020 41 mins

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 - even misanthropic - and generally tasked with sitting alone in a room, mired in their own thoughts and pulling words out of thin air which they clack down onto screens and then wo

Eduardo Galeano: Memory of Fire

Aug 27 2020 24 mins

Recorded live on stage in Toronto in 1988, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano - a wholly unique writer that could only have come out of leftist Latin America in the middle part of the 20th century - shows us in this reading from his trilogy, Memory of Fire, snippets of the lives that he spent his entire career spotlighting. Whether he’s showing us stories of the lives of the poor

Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus

Aug 13 2020 33 mins

Salman Rushdie tells a story about a reading he was asked to do for a UK book festival early in his career. On the ticket with Rushdie was another young British writer, Angela Carter who, when taking the stage, looked out into a sparsely attended event and spontaneously invited the entire group of attendees to continue the event across the road at the Pub. That sense of Carter -- i

Luisa Valenzuela: Love of Animals

Jul 30 2020 18 mins

Recorded at Toronto’s Harbourfront Reading Series in 1979, Argentine author, Luisa Valenzuela recruits Founding Artistic Director of the Harbourfront Reading Series, Greg Gatenby, to be her reading partner in a complex story of two cars as they race through the streets of Buenos Aires. In a style that is like no other writer of her generation or since, Valenzuela portrays the col

Richard Wagamese: A Quality of Light

Jul 16 2020 27 mins

This recording, made in Toronto in 1996, was the first public reading Richard Wagamese ever did. Done on the publication of his 2nd novel, A Quality of Light, Wagamese references in his opening comments the struggles he faced as an Indigenous artist in a world often hostile to these voices. From his early life and early displacement as a boy to his early writing career at the Calga

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Jul 02 2020 37 mins

In an early draft of one of Irving’s most beloved novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving’s reading makes Owen Meany come alive in a way that his reader may never have experienced before. Whether a long-time fan of Irving or Owen Meany or new to the novel, this reading captures why Irving is such an entertaining reader but also such a vital and natural storyteller. Irving’s