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), and Loghan Paylor (The Cure for Drowning).

Listen to our conversations now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming November 1 and 7, How I Wrote This presents a 2-part special to celebrate the 2024 #GillerPrize.

Participating authors include (in alphabetical order): Caroline Adderson (A way to be Happy), Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts), Eric Chacour (What I Know About You), Corinna Chong (Bad Land), Anne Fleming (Curiosities), Conor Kerr (Prairie Edge), Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History), Loghan Paylor (The Cure for Drowning), Deepa Rajagopalan (Peacocks of Instagram), Jane Urquhart (In Winter I Get Up at Night), and katherena vermette (real ones).

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, grandfather, mother - and aunt, an 80-year-old burlesque dancer who was inducted into the Las Vegas Burlesque Hall of Fame - has left its mark on her.

While an activist in the Canadian Peace Movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Shaena met Petra Kelly, the charismatic leader of the Green Party in West Germany, and Petra’s lover, Gert Bastien, who accompanied her. After the shock of her death, Petra became the subject of Sheana’s second novel.

Off the Record, edited by John Metcalf, is the most recent collection of essays and short stories where you can find Shaena’s writing.

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Wiebke is one of only a handful of women in Canada who has directed three or more feature films. In 2002, she directed Marion Bridge, which starred Molly Parker and won Best First Canadian Feature at TIFF. She went on to direct Stay with Taylor Shilling and Aidan Quinn and The Saver, which won her a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2016 at the Canadian Screen Awards. The novel Claremont is Wiebke’s first book and it’s been optioned for a limited series on TV. She is currently at work on her next novel as well as the development of her next film, a thriller called Someone’s Daughter.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 left and settled in Germany where his ethnicity marked him as an outsider. He grew up fast, fell in with gangs, and nearly went to prison for trafficking drugs. Things got better only when he moved to Berlin, got a job at a famous techno club, and became manager of the upscale restaurant next door where they welcomed guests like Quentin Tarantino and Karl Lagerfeld. Three years later he opened a bar of his own and began trying to write movie scripts. Eventually one the scripts turned into a novel and in 2022 he published Hund, Wolf, Schakal and won a nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann Award. In February, the book, which was adapted for the stage, premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theatre.

Behzad’s recommended reads:

• Heinrich Böll
• Peter Weiss
• Christian Kracht
• 
  

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Fallada Prize and the International Foreign Fiction Prize while Go, Went, Gone, which prompted the critic James Wood to predict that she would one day win the Nobel Prize, won the Thomas Mann Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker International. In May 2024, after this conversation was recorded, Jenny and her translator, Michael Hofmann, were the winners of the International Booker Prize for her latest novel, Kairos, about a love affair that crumbles while the East itself falls apart.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 exposed to the English obsession with gardening, her response was to co-write a book about it. Twenty years later, she’d tackled nature, astronomy, exploration, and 18th century philosophy.

Her books include This Other Eden, The Brother Gardeners, Chasing Venus, Founding Gardeners, The Invention of Nature, and Magnificent Rebels. She is a winner of the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Award, and many other international awards.

Andrea’s recommended reads:

• Juli Zeh
• Stefan Zweig

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 in Gaza shared by an Israeli and a Palestinian; and Cockroach, adapted from the novel by Rawi Hage. Jonathan has also published essays, poetry, a memoir, and in 2023, his debut novel, In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark.

Jonathan’s recommended reads:

Nicholson Baker

Jenny Erpenbeck

Tilman Rammstedt

Nino Haratischwili

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media.

Original music track Attention to Details by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.