The Wandering Book Collector
By Michelle Jana Chan
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Image by Michelle Jana Chan
Category: Places & Travel
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Episodes: 38
Description
The Wandering Book Collector with host Michelle Jana Chan airs regular conversations with writers exploring what's informed their books and their lives around themes of movement, memory, sense of place, borders, identity, belonging and home. The podcast has welcomed Booker and Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, such as Bernardine Evaristo, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Karen Joy Fowler, Carla Power and Maaza Mengiste. The choice of writers is representative of the world around us, naturally. https://linktr.ee/thewanderingbookcollector
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| Episode | Date |
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Hilary Bradt on getting lost; on the Galapagos and Inca Trail in the 1970s; on aerograms v social media; on hitch-hiking at 82; on her guidebooks to Burma, Iraq, Iran and N Korea; on public footpaths and bluebells; and on feeling homesick — with TWBC
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Apr 24, 2024 |
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Ginanne Brownell on hearing clarinets and trombones by a Nairobi city dump; on a fairytale morphing; on big skies; on searching for a cemetery by Lake Michigan; on her next book: a global surrogacy journey — with TWBC
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Mar 28, 2024 |
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Nastassja Martin on her near-death encounter with a Kamchatka bear; on the boundaries between humankind and nature; on linear v spiral storytelling; on being in between worlds; on dreams, and on waking from them — with TWBC
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Jan 18, 2024 |
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Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ on life in Lagos and Norwich; on how family pressure shapes you; on hope as something active; on walking to get out of one’s head; on random news items; and on writing a story, leaving out all the politics — with TWBC
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Nov 17, 2023 |
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Daljit Nagra on his sense of mischief; on abandoning 30 line poems; on his first language Punjabi; on listening to Miles Davis; on fully expecting to fail; on the nine-metre man and snake gods; and on straight bananas — with TWBC
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Aug 30, 2023 |
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Khashayar J Khabushani on hyphenated identity; on Dodgers jerseys and drinking beer; on memoir v fiction; on belonging where we are born; on hopefulness and youthfulness; on the myth of LA; and on missing hearing Farsi — with TWBC
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Aug 02, 2023 |
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Hanne Ørstavik on love, love and more love; on travelling with her books; on openness and vulnerability as two sides of the same thing; on 16 books written as one big novel; on the power of silence in Mexico; and on embarrassing notebooks — with TWBC
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Jul 17, 2023 |
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Damian Le Bas on rambunctious families; on van life; on slag heaps and rubbish tips; on lecturing kids; on the only seasons of summer and winter; on the question “where are you from?”; and on looking like a Division 4 Swedish footballer — with TWBC
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Jun 11, 2023 |
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Sophie Ward on experimental education; on flaws and frailties and guilt; on saying “my wife”; on child acting; on the US-Vietnam War; on her superpower; on writing more about Detective Sergeant Carter; on outliers; on travelling to Mars — with TWBC
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May 17, 2023 |
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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on riding matatus in Kenya; on the community he misses most; on torture and imagination; on the fun of writing a book on toilet paper; on birds, bees and butterflies; on which book is next; on where he wants to retire — with TWBC
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Apr 29, 2023 |
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Doreen Cunningham on Arctic ice; on bullying; on community as hope; on the fact there are whales singing in the sea still, in spite of it all; on Amtrak trains; on bank loans and luck; on mothering; on the gray whales of the Puget Sound— with TWBC
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Mar 29, 2023 |
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Kylie Moore-Gilbert on her most treasured possession in prison; on training herself to memorise everything in a room, and on recall; on solitary confinement, hope and freedom; on how it feels to be in an airport immigration queue — with TWBC
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Feb 22, 2023 |
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Osman Yousefzada on writing about a community that didn’t want to be documented; on illiteracy; on being polite; on his photographic memory and eye for detail; on being on an eternal road; on the right passport and the wrong passport — with TWBC
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Feb 07, 2023 |
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Frances Stonor Saunders on stamp-collecting; on Alzheimer’s and collective amnesia; on folding maps the wrong way; on what you would take if you were fleeing; on subversive humour; on inanimate objects; on never writing another book again — with TWBC
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Jan 12, 2023 |
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Justin Marozzi on what makes a city great; on wanting to live in Istanbul, but not Jerusalem; on finding your bearings in time and space; on pilgrimages; on feeling like an outsider more than ever; on waking up in an unknown city alone — with TWBC
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Dec 18, 2022 |
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Roger Robinson on roadtripping around Britain's coastline; on the white light of Trinidad; on Black Joy; on what he sees looking at the sea; on moving to Marseille, or anywhere; on police knees on throats; on creative citizenship — with TWBC
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Dec 01, 2022 |
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Anthony Sattin on nomadic thinking; on whether one plus one really does equal two; on the survival of the hunter-gatherer; on assabiyah; on digital nomads; on Bruce Chatwin’s unpublished writing; on telling stories around campfires — with TWBC
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Nov 11, 2022 |
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Ariana Neumann on inherited memory; on getting angry in Spanish; on wanting to speak Czech and have a little house on the Vltava; on the migrant crisis in Venezuela; on betrayal and hope; on travelling and feeling the wind on your face — with TWBC
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Oct 23, 2022 |
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Mother & daughter Karen Joy Fowler and Shannon Leone Fowler on historical fact, the imagination and the revision of memory; on childhood freedoms and unstructured time; on keeping a journal; on the heroics of librarians — with TWBC
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Oct 02, 2022 |
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Tim Mackintosh-Smith on the settled v the wanderer; on capital letters and capital cities; on his hometown San’a; on mesmerising language, the heft of translation and sonorous tripe; on libraries, scud missiles and alabaster window panes — with TWBC
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Sep 18, 2022 |
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Mona Arshi on transitioning from lawyer to poet to novelist; on silence; on the energy of adolescence; on not wanting to be persuasive; on listening to birdsong and hearing Punjabi; on writing on trains; on “tornado poems” — with TWBC
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Sep 03, 2022 |
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Winnie M Li on the author as activist; on sexual assault and consent and #metoo; on writing both perspectives — of perpetrator and victim; on the memories we can choose, and those foisted upon us; and on getting back on the road — with TWBC
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Aug 07, 2022 |
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Jennifer Steil on unexpected connections between places; on "in between-ness"; on friendship in Yemen; on the Jewish diaspora in Bolivia; on the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan; on living in a permanent state of nostalgia; and on gallons of gin — with TWBC
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Jul 24, 2022 |
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"War Child" Emmanuel Jal on a special edition of The Wandering Book Collector, including the title track of his new album Shangah
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Jul 10, 2022 |
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Kathryn D. Sullivan on our oceans; on an adventurous childhood; on maps and plotting journeys; on moving in microgravity; on time travel; on a ticket to Mars; on Moscow during the Cold War; and on losing sight of Planet Earth, literally — with TWBC
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Jun 08, 2022 |
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Preti Taneja on finding the words; on collective grief; on Partition; on the question of home and how prison is never home; on the inevitability of political writing; on anguish; on the necessary fiction that is trust — with TWBC
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May 22, 2022 |
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Rebecca Mead on the to-ing and fro-ing between New York and London; on being mis/understood; on migration in your 20s v your 50s; on Trieste; on eavesdropping on buses — with TWBC
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May 04, 2022 |
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Horatio Clare on madness, mania and healing; on migrating swallows; on keeping a diary; on being the other in othering; on "the love of many things" and Van Gogh — with TWBC
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Apr 20, 2022 |
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Brigid Delaney on restlessness, on the mania around wellness, on Seneca and stoicism, on Australia's tough lockdown and where she is choosing to go first (Bali), not forgetting cockatoos — with TWBC
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Apr 07, 2022 |
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Geoffrey Kent on a special SAFARI edition of The Wandering Book Collector
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Mar 27, 2022 |
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Sara Wheeler on Russia and its writers of the Golden Age: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and on language, translation, etymology and bathmats across nine time zones -- with TWBC
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Mar 13, 2022 |
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Kapka Kassabova on the Balkans, on growing up behind the Iron Curtain, on the inheritance of pain, on writing by water, on alchemistry, on healing -- with TWBC
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Mar 02, 2022 |
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Maaza Mengiste on Ethiopia, on women in war, on pulling the trigger, on photography, on writing in Rome, on standing before monuments to fascism, on Project 3541 -- with TWBC
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Feb 15, 2022 |
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Carla Power on how to deradicalise your town, on the journey back from extremism, on a childhood across Afghanistan, India, Iran and Egypt, as well as St Louis, Missouri, and on the Islamic feminist theologian Amina Wadud -- with TWBC
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Feb 03, 2022 |
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Afua Hirsch on London, Senegal, Ghana, on imperial nostalgia, on the African diaspora, on plane journeys, and on choosing a name for her daughter -- with TWBC
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Jan 19, 2022 |
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Bernardine Evaristo on London, Nigeria, Brazil, the Royal Society of Literature, on travelling as a Black woman in Estonia, on the Booker, on marble bathrooms, and on Never Giving Up -- with TWBC
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Dec 29, 2021 |
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Janine di Giovanni on covering conflicts in Syria, Gaza and Bosnia, on vanishing Christian communities in the Middle East, and on nesting, on loneliness, on risk, and on not going home -- with TWBC
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Dec 14, 2021 |
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The Trailer - The Wandering Book Collector
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Dec 04, 2021 |