Eleanor Wachtel interviews Sarah Polley to kick off new interview series at 2024 Blue Metropolis Festival

This year's Blue Metropolis Festival will feature a new interview series with Montreal-born writer and broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel. 

Wachtel hosted CBC Radio's Writers & Company for 33 years before retiring in June 2023. The show is currently airing as repeats on CBC Radio.

Blue Metropolis is an annual literary festival in Montreal. It runs in-person from April 25-28, with online events starting mid-April. Bringing together authors and readers from around the world and across languages, this year's theme is dreams and utopia. 

LISTEN | A celebration of Eleanor Wachtel and Writers & Company: 

Writers and Company1:35:08Celebrating Writers & Company: 33 years of exceptional interviews with the incomparable Eleanor Wachtel

For Writers & Company's final original episode, Eleanor Wachtel is interviewed on-stage by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current. She then speaks with American authors Brandon Taylor and Gary Shteyngart, and receives surprise greetings from the likes of Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith.

Wachtel will host a new interview series, the first edition of which will include a discussion with Canadian filmmaker and author Sarah Polley.

Wachtel will also be honoured with a tribute event where she'll be interviewed by Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Madeleine Thien on April 26.

Wachtel will interview German American writer Nora Krug on the 28th. 

• Nora Krug asks tough questions about her German family's wartime past

British writer Robert Macfarlane will be awarded the Blue Metropolis Planet Literature Prize for his body of work and will be in conversation at the festival on April 27th. He is best known for the award-winning trilogy Mountain of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways that discuss landscape and the human heart. His work has been adapted for the screen and radio and has been translated into over a dozen languages.

Other notable authors at the festival include Tanya Talaga, Anuja Varghese, Catherine Leroux, Sky Gilbert and Romeo Dallaire. 

Talaga is an award-winning journalist and author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, the book version of her 2018 Massey Lecture. She'll receive the Blue Metropolis First Peoples' Literary Prize. 

• Seven Fallen Feathers author Tanya Talaga shares her 6 favourite books

Varghese will be in conversation at the festival as well, following the success of her debut short story collection Chrysalis, which centres South Asian women, showing how they reclaim their power in a world that constantly undermines them.

It won the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.

• CBC Books' writers to watch: 30 Canadian writers making their mark in 2023

Leroux will also be taking the festival stage fresh off her 2024 Canada Reads win. Her novel, The Future, translated by Susan Ouriou, tells the story of an alternate history where the French never left Detroit. It was championed by author Heather O'Neill. 

• Heather O'Neill, championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, wins Canada Reads 2024

The Blue Metropolis Festival is hosting a children's festival which will include more that 70 activities in libraries around Montreal and across Quebec from April 19-29. Featured authors include Paul Tom, Dïana Bélice, Monique Polak and Tara McGowan-Ross. 

For a complete list of the festival's events and for tickets for the paid events, visit their website.