My guest on this episode is Guy Vanderhaeghe. Guy is a three-time winner of the Governor’s-General Award for his collections of short stories, Man Descending and Daddy Lenin, and for his novel, The Englishman’s Boy, which was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize and The International Dublin Literary Award. His novel The Last Crossing was a winner of the CBC’s Canada Reads Competition. He has also received the Timothy Findley Prize, the Harbourfront Literary Prize, and the Cheryl and Henry Kloppenburg Prize, all given for a body of work. Guy’s most recent novel, August into Winter, won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and the Glengarry Book Award and was shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize. His most recent book, the essay collection Because Someone Asked Me To, was published in 2024 by Thistledown Press. That book won Book of the Year and the Non-Fiction Award at the 2025 Saskatchewan Book Awards. Shelagh Rogers, former host of the CBC’s “The Next Chapter”, said that “reading this volume, I felt all my circuitry light up like a flash of fireflies, as Nadine Gordimer would say. I’m just so glad somebody asked him to.”

Guy and I talk about some critical advice he got from author Margaret Laurence when he first started as a writer, the enormous shifts that have happened in the Canadian literary scene since those early days, and why his most recent novel might be his last.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

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