How I Wrote This

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 …

Ivana Sajko is a Croatian artist whose work crosses from literature to dance, theatre to music and experimental performance. Despite coming of age during Croatia’s War of Independence, she rejected t…

Julia Franck was born in 1970 in East Berlin in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), a part of Germany that, at the time, was behind the Iron Curtain. As a child, she fled with her mother to …

Literary podcast How I Wrote This returns for Season 2. Join host Pamela Hensley for eight incredible conversations with (mostly) Berlin-based writers who have also published books in English. They i…

Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion.

Michelle became a laps…

H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature.

When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Gr…

Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had…

Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec.

Until t…

Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country.

Just four years after moving t…

Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone, why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life.

Sean emigrate…

Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation…

Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing…

Heather is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. In 2006 she published her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which critics called “hypnotic” and pr…

An introduction to the new podcast about authors, their books, and the story behind their stories.

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Promotional support from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

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