The Shakespeare and Company Interview – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Shakespeare and Company Interview

Shakespeare and Company

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/11d. Total Eps: 213

Discover your next favourite book, or take a deep dive into the mind of an author you love, with The Shakespeare and Company Interview podcast.

Now also the home of Editions: A Shakespeare and Company x Faber Production.

Long-form interviews with internationally acclaimed authors, recorded from our bookshop in the heart of Paris. Hosted by S&Co Literary Director, Adam Biles.

Discover all our upcoming events here.

If you enjoy these conversations, you can order The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews here.

Past guests include: Ottessa Moshfegh, Ian McEwan, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Katie Kitamura, Elif Shafak, Claire-Louiose Bennett, Leïla Simoni, Ian Dunt, David Runciman, Richard Powers, Eimear McBride, Armando Iannucci, Lauren Grodd, Lauren Elkin, Recebcca Solnit, John Berger, Hollie McNish, Michael Pedersen, Rob Doyle, Philippe Sands, George Saunders, Edouard Louis, Rachel Cusk, Preti Taneja, Alejandro Zambra, DBC Pierre, Meg Mason, Sandra Newman, David Simon, Joshua Cohen, Geoff Dyer, David Wallce-Wells, Emul Saint-John Mandel, Mohsin Hamid, Tess Gunty, A.M. Homes, John Higgs, Miriam Toews, Kamila Shamsie, Annie Ernaux, William Boyd, David Keenan, Jonathan Coe, Coco Mellors, Tom Mustill, Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Churchwell, Katy Hessel, Don Paterson, Elizabeth McCracken, Meena Kandasamy, Aleksandar Hemon, Catherine Lacey, Xiaolu Guo, M. John Harrison, Dolly Adderton, Hernan Diaz, Kathryn Scanlan, Ben Lerner, Isabel Waidner, Nick Laird, Adam Thirlwell, Mark O'Connell, Marie Darrieussecq, Jo Ann Beard, C Pam Zhang, Naomi Klein...and many, many more.

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

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Apple Podcasts

🇩🇪 Germany - books
25/08/2026
#98
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
24/08/2026
#83
🇩🇪 Germany - books
24/08/2026
#73
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
23/08/2026
#48

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https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england
68 shares
https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses
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https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time
45 shares

https://open.acast.com/public/patreon/fanSubscribe/7618834
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Score global : 63%

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Roxy Dunn on As Young As This

Wednesday, August 28, 2024 • Duration 37:35

Our guest this week is Roxy Dunn, whose debut novel As Young As This is a meticulous examination of the lives and loves of young women today. Told, strikingly, in the second person, it is structured by the the succession of first boys, then men in the protagonist Margot’s life, and populated by dysfunctional friends and a wisecracking, but deeply caring family. As Young As This is as witty as it is sincere, as revealing as it is touching. Pandora Sykes said that “with glorious attention to detail and emotional fluency, Dunn charts the ways in which we are built and broken by love” while Daisy Buchanan called As Young As This 'Raw, funny and beautiful” adding that it’s a “really gorgeously observed novel about youth and womanhood”

Buy As Young As This: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/as-young-as-this

Roxy Dunn is a Writer/Performer and graduate of the BBC Comedy Writersroom. She’s acted in multiple television sitcoms and her shows have received sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe and SOHO Theatre. Her scripts have been optioned by several production companies and her pilot Useless Millennials was commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As Young as This is her first novel.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-england

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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

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Poetry: Ishion Hutchinson reads from and discusses School of Instructions

Wednesday, August 21, 2024 • Duration 47:31

School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experience—brutal, significant, but long overlooked—of West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinary—by which I mean mischievous and sweet-natured—boy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire continue to distort the lives of the people of once colonised lands. School of Instructions—which was shortlisted for the 2023 T. S. Eliot Prize—is a profound, affecting book, quite unlike any other work of poetry.

Buy School of Instructions: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/school-of-instructions

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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

Sheila Heti on Alphabetical Diaries

Thursday, May 23, 2024 • Duration 50:07

Last week we were joined by the wonderful Sheila Heti to celebrate the launch of her Alphabetical Diaries. In taking a decade of her journals, sorting the sentences alphabetically, then paring them down to about a tenth of their original length, Sheila Heti has freed a slice of her life from the shackles of time and in doing so has extracted some other, deeper kind of meaning from it. Alphabetical Diaries is a work that provokes vertiginous reflections on the construction of the self; that reveals how our psychological ticks and day-to-day fixations weigh heavily on our lives; that leads us to reconsider how we see, treat, judge and misjudge our friends and lovers; and that even makes us question how the book as an object works. In conversation with Adam Biles.

Buy Alphabetical Diaries: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/alphabetical-diaries-2

Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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

Dostoyevsky, the Parisian murderer, and the creation of a masterpiece, with Kevin Birmingham

Wednesday, March 2, 2022 • Duration 57:29

In The Sinner and the Saint, Kevin Birmingham deftly unpicks the personal, societal, historical and philosophical forces that led Fyodor Dostoyeksky—isolated, indebted, beset by epileptic seizures—to take up his pen in the summer of 1865 and begin writing Crime and Punishment, and shows how it’s impossible to understand the invention of Rasklonikov without also getting to grips with the mind of a French murderer-poet who charmed and outraged Parisian society, in almost equal measure, three decades earlier—the notorious Pierre François Lacenaire.

Buy The Sinner and the Saint here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241235942/the-sinner-and-the-saint-dostoevsky-a-crime-and-its-punishment

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

An insider’s history of Rock & Roll, with Lenny Kaye

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 • Duration 01:08:08

This week we’re joined by the legendary guitarist, composer, record producer, writer, and founding member of Patti Smith and Her Band, Lenny Kaye to discuss his epic and illuminating new book Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock & Roll

Buy Lighting Striking here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781474615075/lightning-striking

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

Looking for Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses? https://podfollow.com/sandcoulysses

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

Early access to complete chapters of Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses
An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.

Poetry, class, and radical performance, with Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 • Duration 55:06

Back in November, Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen dropped by the bookshop for a reading and a chat. The conversation touched on poetry, class, adapting the Greeks, artistic cross-pollination, the perks of being Scottish writer, and how midwives are the toughest crowd of all . . .

Buy Slug here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780349726366/slug-the-sunday-times-bestseller

Buy Oyster here:

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

** Valentine's Special ** Love, Language and London with Xiaolu Guo

Thursday, February 10, 2022 • Duration 47:13

For the Valentine’s week episode of our podcast, we were joined by Xiaolu Guo to discuss her intense, fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, A Lover’s Discourse.

Buy A Lover’s Discourse here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781529112481/a-lovers-discourse

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch.

Comedy and the Culture Wars, with Andrew Hankinson

Thursday, February 3, 2022 • Duration 01:04:29

This week’s guest is Andrew Hankinson, author of the brilliant Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.), a book about three things:

1. A room called the Comedy Cellar.

2. Who gets to speak in that room.

3. What they get to say.

Buy Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9781911617686/dont-applaud-either-laugh-or-dont-at-the-comedy-cellar

Browse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore

SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURES

If you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including:

An initiation into the world of rare book collecting;
The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles;
Handpicked classic interviews from our archive;
And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.

Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandco

Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandco

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=en

Patrick Hastings, The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses

Saturday, January 29, 2022 • Duration 01:02:44

In anticipation of the first episode of Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses this Wednesday, we were delighted to talk to former S&Co tumbleweed Patrick Hastings, and the creator of UlyssesGuide.com, about The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses, his essential companion to this modernist classic.Buy The Guide to James Joyce’s Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781421443492/the-guide-to-james-joyces-ulysses*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURESAll episodes of Friends of Shakespeare Read Ulysses are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=enSubscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandcoSubscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoIn addition, if you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of the bookshop's interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.*Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.comBuy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulyssesFind out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/homeAdam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeHear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpSHear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/Follow him on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/

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

Nadifa Mohamed on The Fortune Men

Thursday, January 27, 2022 • Duration 52:41

This week’s guest is Booker-shortlisted Nadifa Mohamed discussing The Fortune Men a gripping fictional portrayal of a real miscarriage of justice in 1950s Cardiff.Buy The Fortune Men here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/I/9780241466940/the-fortune-men-shortlisted-for-the-costa-novel-of-the-year-awardBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstore*SUBSCRIBE NOW FOR BONUS FEATURESIf you want to spend even more time at Shakespeare and Company, you can now subscribe for regular bonus episodes including: An initiation into the world of rare book collecting; The chance to expand your reading horizons as our passionate booksellers recommend their favourite titles; Handpicked classic interviews from our archive; And an insight into what makes your favourite writers tick as they answer searching questions from our Café’s Proust questionnaire.Subscribe on Spotify here: https://anchor.fm/sandcoSubscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoSubscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/shakespeare-and-company-writers-books-and-paris/id1040121937?l=enAll money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop’s non-profit, created to fund our noncommercial activities—from the upstairs reading library, to the writers-in-residence program, to our charitable collaborations, and our free events.*Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served. It is only in the run-up to the trial, as the prospect of freedom dwindles, that it will dawn on Mahmood that he is in a terrifying fight for his life - against conspiracy, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. And, under the shadow of the hangman's noose, he begins to realise that the truth may not be enough to save him.*Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa, Somaliland, in 1981 and moved to Britain at the age of four. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, won the Betty Trask Prize; it was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN Open Book Award. Her second novel, Orchard of Lost Souls, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Nadifa Mohamed was selected for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Nadifa Mohamed lives in London.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman’s Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1

The Shakespeare and Company Interview – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Shakespeare and Company Interview – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Spotify11

Acast1

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Spotify11

Acast1

Apple Podcasts

Spotify