Barbara Reid’s Plasticine artwork makes her books instantly recognizable. They have won acclaim around the world, and many awards. We talk here about what makes her so good, about great children’s book illustrators, the accurate conveyance of emotion, mice in subways, making room for the imagination, chiaroscuro, working in ice cream, wanting to show things to those you love, pony tails, playing hooky and war.

Ramona Dearing lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and is the latest member of the longstanding (and increasingly famous) fiction collective The Burning Rock to publish a collection of short fiction. Dearing works for CBC Radio where she is currently busy putting together a nationally broadcast program featuring young Canadian artists. So Beautiful was published in 2004 by The Porcupine’s Quill Press.

We talk here about her stories, my favourites, and hers, bodies in bags, judging one’s own work, doing the right thing, frustration, Christian brothers at Mount Cashel, dogs, Kafka at the CBC, the importance of radio and the weather to Newfoundlanders, Brad Pitt and parallel plot lines.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

Lisa Moore’s fiction has been published widely in literary magazines and in anthologies. Her two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open have received praise for their ’supple sensuality and emotional authenticity.’ She lives in Newfoundland. We talked there, and here about her recently published first novel, Alligator, about tea, pine martins, time, the exotic, Tasmania, Cezanne, St. John’s as a bowl of oranges, Cubism, being in the present, survival, light, if it’s ever okay not to be good, cadence and wit in storytelling, and the colour blue…quite a few things really.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

James O. Born is a Special Agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and author of three best selling crime novels. We talk about his most recent, Escape Clause; about blurbs, putting humour and a human face on the real life experience of cops, how life followed art in this novel, Karma and good moral compasses, the goal of writing compelling prose with surprise endings, cheer leading competitions, smacking people who talk of movie options without deliverying, Jaws, the compulsion to write and the unsurpassibility of Elmore Leonard.

Australian Tim Winton wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer (1982), at the age of 19. It won the Australian/Vogel National Literary Award.

Born in Perth, in 1960, he is the author of Shallows (1986), a novel set in a whaling town, and Cloudstreet (1991), the story of two working-class families rebuilding their lives. Both won Miles Franklin Awards. The Riders (1995) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize.

He is also the author of two collections of short stories, Scission and Other Stories (1987) and Minimum of Two (1987), and co-author of several travel books about Australia, including Land’s Edge (1993). Dirt Music (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize.

I spoke with him during the 2005 Toronto International Writers Festival about his latest book The Turning, a series of linked stories. He seemed tired, a bit bummed about having been away from home for so long. The bloody tape ran out right in the middle of a lovely story he was telling about his converting wood from an old weir into a set of bookshelves for his library. An extremely likeable, self effacing man with interesting ideas about the relationship between writing and music, as you will hear if you choose to listen…

Copyright © 2005 by Nigel Beale

ANDREW MILLER was born in Bristol…in 1960 (induced, according to the family legend, by his mother eating a large supper of fish and chips). At age eleven, having convincingly failed his Eleven Plus, he went to boarding school in Wiltshire…Master of Arts in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in 1991…PhD from Lancaster University…In February 1996, after six years of writing, ‘Ingenious Pain’ his first novel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Grinzane Cavour prize & the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Ingenious Pain & his second novel Casanova are being/have been adapted for Film. His novel, Oxygen, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2001. His third novel, Oxygen was shortlisted for the Booker. His books have been published in over twenty countries. He now lives in Brighton and believes that on clear days he can see the coast of France. His latest novel is THE OPTIMISTS, published in March 2005.

We talk about it, prizes, Shakespeare, Hardy, Lawrence, stylism, and his looks and wish to be a fat woman. Andrew Miller is as articulate orally as he is in writing. Hear…don’t just take my word for it…

Copyright © 2005 by Nigel Beale.