Born during the Depression in Lockport, New York, Joyce Carol Oates started writing as a teen and has since written more than one hundred books, many of them portraying the darkness of American society. Her writing has earned her virtually every major American literary prize, as well as Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Grand Prix in 2012. After accepting that prize, she joined Eleanor Wachtel on stage to talk about her life, her work and her latest novel, Mudwoman.

The Indian journalist and novelist writes stories that are autobiographical and revealing. Kumar joined Eleanor Wachtel in 2018 to talk about his book Immigrant, Montana - a mix of fiction, memory, politics and the pursuit of romance. Kumar's new novel is called My Beloved Life.

Even though Edna O’Brien left Ireland more than 50 years ago, the texture and atmosphere of the country continue to permeate her work. Her first seven books were banned or suppressed in Ireland. In fact her debut novel, The Country Girls, was burned in her home parish for depicting the ambitions and sexual desires of young women. Today, O'Brien is celebrated as one of Ireland's greatest living writers.

In this conversation with Eleanor Wachtel from 2009, Edna O'Brien talks about her scandalous early success, her mother's enduring influence, and her portrait of Romantic poet Lord Byron, the world's first global celebrity. 2024 marks the 200th anniversary of Byron's death, when he was just 36 years old.

In 2018, Eleanor Wachtel went to New York City to interview one of North America's most renowned and daring creative pioneers, Laurie Anderson. The multimedia artist and musician had just published her retrospective book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, inspired by the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which destroyed Anderson's archive of work and memorabilia. In this career-spanning and deeply personal conversation, she talks about the connection between story and memory, growing up in the Midwest with seven brothers and sisters, her relationship with Lou Reed, her partner of 21 years, and becoming unlikely pen pals with John F. Kennedy.

This week, for Pride season, the Oscar-nominated playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner. Known most recently for his movie collaborations with Steven Spielberg, including Lincoln, Westside Story and The Fablemans, Kushner's breakout hit was his epic play Angels in America, the winner of multiple Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards. Fuelled by the AIDS crisis and Reaganism in the 1980s, the play was made into an opera and an HBO miniseries starring Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson. In this conversation with Eleanor Wachtel from 2011, Kushner also talks about his later work, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, a family drama that evokes George Bernard Shaw and Mary Baker Eddy.

This week, American Canadian novelist Claire Messud. Throughout her career and in her new book, This Strange Eventful History, one of TIME’s most anticipated of 2024, Messud draws on her own family's history, especially that of her French Algerian father. In 2001 she spoke with Eleanor about her novel The Last Life, which traces three generations of a French Algerian family from the perspective of a teenage girl. To conclude the program, Messud reads a chapter from the novel.

In honour of the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Eleanor Wachtel revisits her 2005 conversation with one of his biographers, Nicholas Murray.

Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024 for her novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. She spoke with Eleanor Wachtel, who chaired the International Booker Prize jury, in 2015 about The End of Days, an imaginative story that spans the 20th century through the eyes of a character who lives multiple versions of her life. Erpenbeck also reflects on her own childhood, growing up in a literary family in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, and the ways in which history, politics and her experience with personal and national transformations have inspired her work.