The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

  Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He favours liberalising copyright laws and is a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books, the most recent of which is called Radicalizing, four SF novellas "connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future." I met with Cory in Ottawa after he'd appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We talk primarily about book publishing, the new EU copyright directive and the practice of writing Science Fiction. 

Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentine novelist and television scriptwriter best known for writing literary crime novels, most of which are best sellers in Latin America. She was born in Buenos Aires and has won numerous literary prizes including the German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Sabe and the Clarin Prize for fiction for Thursday Night Widows. Four of her novels have been translated into English by Bitter Lemon Press, all of which have been adapted into feature films.  We met at The Blue Met Literary Festival (Claudia was awarded the 2019 Premio Azul, Blue Met’s Spanish-language prize) in Montreal to talk about, among other things, Edgar Allan Poe, G.K. Chesterton and detective stories; literary prizes, and the difference between writing novels and television series screenplays.   

Born in Buenos Aires in 1948, Alberto Manguel grew up in Tel-Aviv, where his father served as the first Argentinian ambassador to Israel. At sixteen, while working at the Pygmalion bookshop in Buenos Aires, he was asked by the blind Jorge Luis Borges to read aloud to him at his home. Manguel left Argentina for Europe before the horrors of the 'disappeared' began, and just after the events of May 1968.   During the 1970s he lived a peripatetic life in France, England, Italy, and Tahiti, reviewing, translating, editing, and always reading. In the 1980s he moved to Toronto where he lived and raised his three children. He became a Canadian citizen and continues to identify his nationality as first and foremost Canadian.   In 2000, Manguel purchased with his partner and renovated a medieval presbytery in the Poitou-Charentes region of France to house his 30,000 books. They left France for New York in 2015. He has received many prizes, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and honorary doctorates from the universities of Liège, in Belgium, Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, UK, and York and Ottawa in Canada. He is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). We met in Montreal at the Blue Met Literary Festival to talk about his latest book Packing My Library (published by Yale University Press). The conversation turns to Canadian politics and Jody Wilson Raybould at about the 42 minute mark and rages on and off from there to the finish. It's a passionate exchange about justice and honesty, and how literature informs real life. 

David Moscrop is a political theorist and SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. He studies democratic deliberation, political decision-making, and digital media, and is a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, and a writer for Maclean's Magazine He also provides regular political commentary for television and radio. His first book Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones was published by Goose Lane Editions in March 2019.  We met at the University of Ottawa to discuss his book, just in time for Canada's 2019 Federal election. Among other things we talk about the story behind the book, making smart voting decisions, Twitter, literary agent Chris Bucci, CBC Ideas; good, rational, autonomous thinking; diverse, trusted news sources; emotional biases, negative political advertising, threats to democracy, partisanship, SNC Lavalin, Jody Wilson Raybould, the importance of investing time in order to understanding politics, bots, good citizenship, voting on principle versus strategically, party discipline, and adopting proportional representation. And for you non-political types: it's a lot more interesting than this makes it sound. 

Although E.K. Brown, a highly admired literary critic, once called poet and bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott "one of the chief masters of Canadian literature," Scott's reputation today lies in tatters.  Mark Abley in his fascinating biography Conversations with a Dead Man, The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, explains why.  I met with him at his home in Point Claire near Montreal - where the ghost of Scott appeared. We talk, among others things, about boarding schools, Canada's residential school system, "genocide," the Department of Indian Affairs, Sir John A. MacDonald, forms of biography, assimilation, the "Indian Problem," and Scott's poetry, notably a sonnet to an “Onondaga Madonna.”   

Mordecai: The Life and Times has been called the ‘award-winningest’ book in Canadian literary history. I met with its author Charles Foran to talk about its subject Mordecai Richler. The guts, aggression, honesty and pride of the man - a man who did things, who wrote to stimulate conversation, and argument, who was socially engaged, who asked hard, uncomfortable questions. We also discuss Richler’s similarities to Pierre Trudeau. His taking on a whole movement over Quebec’s sign laws; his desire to write the best novel ever written, least one book that would last; about Montreal, its tensions, and his loyalty to it; and about Canadian culture, digitization and the loss of literary life. This interview was conducted in June, 2012

Kit Maude is a Spanish-to-English translator. He received a bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2009 he moved to Buenos Aires where he currently lives. His translations have been featured in Granta, the Literary Review,  the Short Story Project, and other publications. We met at the Falena bookstore/wine bar in the Chacarita neighbourhood of Buenos Aires to talk literary tourism over a glass. Here's our conversation (the bookstore we reference that was once a performing arts theater, then a cinema, is called El Ateneo Grand Splendid). 

Jonathan Rose is the William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in Madison, NJ. His fields of study are British history, intellectual history and the history of the book (in which he happens to be a giant). His books include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor both of which won important prizes. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge and Princeton University and he reviews books for the The Times Literary Supplement and the Daily Telegraph.  Most important viz our purposes: he was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and for many years, co-editor of its journal 'Book History'.  I met with Jonathan at SHARP'S annual conference in Amherst, MA #Sharp19, to talk about his role in establishing the society. We also chat about SHARP'S history, purpose, future, and noticeable vibrancy, about the importance of history text books; Gone with the Wind; JFK, and Playboy magazine (okay, the last only in passing).   

Ana María Cabanellas began her career as a lawyer, after which she joined the family-owned publishing company Editorial Heliasta as a partner. In 1979, she became President of Editorial Claridad which specializes in legal dictionaries, as well as fiction, philosophy and history. In 2006, Ms Cabanellas founded UnaLuna, which publishes children’s books.  Over the years she has been extremely active in industry associations. For example, she is currently Vice- president of CADRA (Centro de Administración de Derechos Reprográficos Asociación Civil), Argentina’s RRO, and Chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee of IFRRO. Previously, she served as President of the Cámara Argentina del Libro for seven years, was Secretary and then President of GIE from 1991-2004, and President of the International Publishers Association from 2004-2008. She speaks frequently at publishing events around the world. In 2012, the Buenos Aires Book Fair named her one of the “50 most influential people in publishing in the Spanish Language.” We met at her offices in BA to talk about her career, her vision, publishing in Argentina, copyright, peace, education and children's books, among many other things. 

Series: Biblio File in Buenos Aires Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Her writing career began at age 17 thanks to a letter she wrote Abelardo Castillo requesting a job at a magazine he edited. During Argentina's so called Dirty War in the seventies and eighties, she defiantly wrote and edited several well known left-wing literary journals, subtly protesting her country's violent, repressive regime, while defending the practice of literature. She also famously engaged in correspondence with Julio Cortázar, arguing that resistance to tyranny is better staged at home where the people can read your work and take faith from it, rather than from abroad.  This from Biblioasis: "She is the author of two novels and numerous books of short stories and essays, in addition to being a founder of two important Argentine literary magazines. Her collected short stories were published in Spanish in 2004 and translated into Hebrew; her stories have been included in anthologies in many countries and languages. Her collection, The Stolen Party and Other Stories, is available in English. Her novel The End of the Story was not only a literary success, but a cultural event that provoked controversy and avid discussion of how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship."   I met Liliana at her home in Buenos Aires to talk about all of the above, and more.   Her collection of short stories, Please Talk to Me, translated by Alberto Manguel and Miranda France, is available from Yale University Press