Quill and Quire

Industry News

« Back to Omni
Articles

TIFA raids the archives for 40th anniversary podcast

Randy Boyagoda

Deep within Ottawa’s Library and Archives Canada lies hours of interviews with major literary figures both living and dead that have taken place at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. This trove of conversations has been recovered for a new podcast, Writers Off The Page, coinciding with TIFA’s 40th anniversary.

With conversations chosen by the Toronto Public Library’s manager of cultural and special event programming Gregory McCormick and introductions by novelist Randy Boyagoda, episodes feature archival interviews with literary icons such as Susan Sontag, Elmore Leonard, Grace Paley, Bruce Chatwin, John Cheever, Gloria Naylor, and Doris Lessing.

“They really locate you in a time and place and moment historically,” Boyagoda says of the archival interviews. “My role as host is to make the case for why you should listen to [these authors] now.”

The first episodes are an interview with Sontag from 2000, conducted by Evan Solomon and divided into four parts. Ironically, Sontag begins with a criticism of the idea that an author is interesting as a person beyond their work.

Boyagoda can see her point. “As a writer myself I would much rather talk about the novel I am working on than myself,” he agrees. “But you acknowledge, of course, that in a setting where you are talking about your work in front of a live audience, they want to know about the person. It does speak to the baseline fact that there are some writers who have inherently interesting lives and when they choose, as Sontag did, to draw on life experience as part of their work you can’t help but want to know more about the writer herself.”

By looking back at the remarkable conversations the festival has featured in its first 40 years, it highlights how TIFA continues to host provocative conversations with literary minds. This year’s festival, which kicked off on Oct. 24 and extends through Nov. 3, will see interviews with authors such as Emma Donoghue, Cherie Dimaline, Michael Crummey, and Anakana Schofield.

Boyagoda himself will interview writer Aleksandar Hemon on Oct. 29. It’s a process he believes continues to have inherent value, nevermind Sontag’s protestations. “Just as a reader and a listener, to have a sense of these very important and thoughtful authors thinking out loud about their work and its relationship to the world around them, what a great thing.”