My guest on this episode is Dennis Bock. Dennis is the author of the short story collection Olympia and the novels The Ash Garden, The Communist’s Daughter, Going Home Again, and The Good German. His work has won the CAA Jubilee Award, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Betty Trask Award, and the Canada-Japan Literary Award, and been shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Kiriyama Prize, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Giller Prize. His most recent novel is Strangers at the Door, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2025. The Winnipeg Free Press called it “eerily delightful.”
Dennis and I talk about how playing guitar helps him write novels, about writing historical fiction that is more focused on the second part of that category than the first, and about learning to allow himself some fallow time between books.
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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