Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon was in Ottawa for the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We talk here about poetry as pemmican, about initials, dashed expectations, the movie Ice Age, James Joyce’s secular epiphanies, the luck of Shakespeare and Mozart, what constitutes great poetry, judgement, pigs, the depths of Johnny Depp and hot water bottles.

Nobel Prize winning poet Derek Walcott read at the Blue Metropolis Writers Festival in Montreal several weeks ago. We talk here about England, parents, Ted Hughes, William Blake, combining painting and poetry, the sea, getting laid, and returning. Like most great men, Mr. Walcott is, in addition to being an articulate, moving communicator, humble and approachable.

Gill Coleridge is a partner with Rogers, Coleridge & White, one of the top literary agencies in the world. I spoke with her at the London Bookfair in March 2006 about how discounting squeezes authors; about the role of the literary agent, the championing of her stable of writers, her pick of England's hottest new literary talents (Peter Hobbs, Adam Thurwell, Phil Lamarsh, Louise Dean, Jim Younger), about cakes,and suicide.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

Neil Wilson is a former journalist/broadcaster, future publisher, current long-distance runner and Founding Director of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. We talk about his love of Irish literature and poetry, his founding of the Festival in 1997, what motivates him to do what he does, and this Spring’s impressive, Beckett-backed line-up which goes on stage April 17, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

Here is my interview with Stephen Page (unparalleled name for a) CEO and Publisher of Faber and newly elected British Publishers Association President conducted at The London Bookfair March 2006. We talk about the role and necessity of publishing houses, the impact of the Internet, discounting, supermarkets, ebooks and 3 for 2 bandaids.

Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale

Why Penises Beat Out Vaginas

Rap as rebellion, slang as hipness, and jargon as obfuscatory exclusionary pretense, these are topics discussed during an interview with world-leading slang lexicographer Jonathon Green last month in his office in London, England. And bloody invigorating it was too. We talk about why penises are funny and beat out vaginas, why slang is negative and misogynist and how it carries a kind of inventive cleverness seldom found in the harmless drudgery of every day language, Samuel Johnson’s political bias, Eric Partridge’s connection with my relative Paul Beale, Jonathon’s insistence on austere objectivity, and the fact that he simply can’t afford to piss around having fun. Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale.