Called "a poet of ecstatic revelation," U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón brings an observant eye and sense of wonder to all her work – from 2015's Bright Dead Things, to her acclaimed 2018 collection, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Limón's latest book, The Hurting Kind, is a finalist for the $130,000 Griffin Poetry Prize. The winner will be announced at a live event, complete with readings, on Wednesday June 7 at Koerner Hall in Toronto.

One of Britain's foremost travel writers, Sara Wheeler has written bestselling books and biographies about the polar region and its famous expeditions, as well as the United States, Chile, Russia and Greece. Now, in Glowing Still: A Woman's Life on the Road, Wheeler turns the lens on herself, considering a life spent on the road and writing in what has historically been a male-dominated genre. Part memoir, part travelogue, Glowing Still spans seven continents and has been described as "funny, furious writing from the queen of intrepid travel."

Daniel Barenboim has been conductor of the Orchestra of Paris and musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Berlin State Opera, a position he held for three decades. Along with the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, Barenboim created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from the Middle East, especially Israel and the Arab world. Speaking to Eleanor Wachtel from Milan in 2008, he talked about the orchestra's historic 2005 concert in Ramallah, growing up on Bach and the meaning of music in his life. This episode originally aired on Wachtel on the Arts on IDEAS in 2008.

From Belgrade and London, the remarkable novelist, poet and memoirist, Vesna Goldsworthy. She spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2019 about her novel Monsieur Ka, an ingenious re-working of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina — picking up where his story left off. Set in post-war London and focusing on the life of Anna's abandoned son, it’s an entertaining and affecting story about identity, exile and fiction.

Author of the powerful and poetic Grief is the Thing With Feathers, the best-selling British novelist talks with Eleanor Wachtel about his new novel, Shy, and his original imaginings of the natural world