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Are you wanting to learn more about canadian literary? Well you’ve come to the right place. This is a curated list of the best canadian literary podcasts of 2022.
We have selected these podcasts for a variety of reasons, but they are all well worth a listen. We tried to select a variety of podcasts across the spectrum from hosts with a wide breadth of experience.
Best Canadian Literary Podcasts 2022
With thanks to ListenNotes, Crunchbase, SemRush and Ahrefs for providing the data to create and rank these podcasts.
The SpokenWeb Podcast
- Publisher: SpokenWeb
- Total Episodes: 56
Stories about how literature sounds. SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast that shares stories from the audio archives of Canadian literary history. Drawing on Canadian literary archival recordings from across Canada, episodes are snapshots of Canadian literary history and contemporary responses to it, including interviews, panel discussions, lectures, readings, and audio essays.
Inspired Word Café
- Publisher: Inspired Word Café Collective
- Total Episodes: 25
Welcome to the official podcast of Inspired Word Café. Join hosts Shimshon Obadia and Emmett MacMillen as they sit down for intimate discussions with writers across the Canadian literary sphere. From household name novelists to your next favourite indie chapbook publishing poet, we’ve got it monthly, right here in your headphones at Inspired Word Café!
Lionel Gelber Prize Podcasts
- Publisher: The Lionel Gelber Prize – at the Munk School of Global Affairs
- Total Episodes: 78
Founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber and presented annually in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues. Enjoy fascinating conversations with the Prize Finalists and Robert Steiner, Director of the Fellowship in Global Journalism and Professor of Global Practice at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Special thanks to Focus Asset Management for their support of this podcast series.
MacroMicroCosm Literary Reviews
- Publisher: macromicrocosm lit journal
- Total Episodes: 27
Reviews of novels, poetry, non-fiction & graphic novels with a distinctly geek-driven Canadian focus. The vocal version of MacroMicroCosm Literary & Art Journal (ISSN 2368-979/X) features articles and reviews, discussions, author interviews and the philosophy of literature.We tend to highlight sci-fi, spec fic & magic realism, and love poetry for its’ experimentalism and edge.
Endnote
- Publisher: Hart House Literary and Library Committee
- Total Episodes: 33
Every other Friday, join Alexander Lynch, Sabryna Ekstein, Marta Anielska, Meixi Zhang, and the Hart House Literary and Library Committee (HHLLC) as they talk about the big ideas in literature with University of Toronto professors and Canadian authors, showcase emerging authors from around the Hart House community, and chat about the books they love. We also feature recordings from HHLLC panels and workshops. Whether you’re a casual reader or a devoted bibliophile, this is the podcast for you!
Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century, The by Francis Parkman, Jr. (1823 – 1893)
- Publisher: LibriVox
- Total Episodes: 80
Parkman has been hailed as one of America’s first great historians and as a master of narrative history. Numerous translations have spread the books around the world. The American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) in his book “O Canada” (1965), described Parkman’s France and England in North America in these terms: “The clarity, the momentum and the color of the first volumes of Parkman’s narrative are among the most brilliant achievements of the writing of history as an art.” Parkman’s biases, particularly his attitudes about nationality, race, and especially Native Americans, has generated criticism. The Canadian historian W. J. Eccles harshly criticized what he perceived as Parkman’s bias against France and Roman Catholic policies, as well as what he considered Parkman’s misuse of French language sources. However, Parkman’s most severe detractor was the American historian Francis Jennings, an outspoken and controversial critic of the European colonization of North America, who went so far as to characterize Parkman’s work as “fiction” and Parkman himself as a “liar”. Unlike Jennings and Eccles, many modern historians have found much to praise in Parkman’s work even while recognizing his limitations. Calling Jennings’ critique “vitriolic and unfair,” the historian Robert S. Allen has said that Parkman’s history of France and England in North America “remains a rich mixture of history and literature which few contemporary scholars can hope to emulate”. The historian Michael N. McConnell, while acknowledging the historical errors and racial prejudice in Parkman’s book The Conspiracy of Pontiac, has said: “…it would be easy to dismiss Pontiac as a curious perhaps embarrassing artifact of another time and place. Yet Parkman’s work represents a pioneering effort; in several ways he anticipated the kind of frontier history now taken for granted…. Parkman’s masterful and evocative use of language remains his most enduring and instructive legacy.” (Summary adapted from Wikipedia by Karen Merline) Part 1: Pioneers of France in the New World Part 2: The Jesuits in North America in the 17th Century Part 4: The Old Régime in Canada Part 5: Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV Part 6: Montcalm and Wolfe Part 7: A Half Century of Conflict
The Wordstock Sudbury Podcast
- Publisher: Wordstock Sudbury
- Total Episodes: 17
The Wordstock Sudbury Podcast is a production of the Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival. Each episode we sit down with poets, novelists and other creatives leaving their mark on the Canadian literary community. We discuss inspiration, writing process and get reading recommendations from some of Canada’s most creative writers. The festival and the podcast strive to have a fresh Northern Ontario perspective and feature writers that live in and write about the North.
Afternoon in July, An by Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (1829 – 1879)
- Publisher: LibriVox
- Total Episodes: 28
LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of An Afternoon in July by Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for July 7, 2013.Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon, born Rosanna Eleanor Mullins, was a Canadian writer and poet. She was “one of the first English-Canadian writers to depict French Canada in a way that earned the praise of, and resulted in her novels being read by, both anglophone and francophone Canadians.”Leprohon’s novels were popular in both English and French Canada in the late 19th-century, and were still being reprinted in French in the mid-1920s. They gradually went out of fashion in the early 20th-century, as literary styles changed.”Since 1970, however,”says the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “the life and works of Rosanna Eleanor Mullins Leprohon have been frequently noted and increasingly praised by critics and scholars of both English-and French-Canadian literature, and new editions of her works have been published.” (Summary by Wikipedia)
Parting Words: A New Poetry Review
- Publisher: Jeremy Audet
- Total Episodes: 3
Parting Words is a response to some of the many emerging poetic voices in Canada, and in this series we will highlight poets who, through their words, are contributing in one way or another to the myriad literary movements of the present, and whose works are achievements in and of themselves. In this podcast you will hear poems read by the poets who wrote them, the poets themselves speak about and to those poems, and critical approaches to their writing. Parting Words is an exercise in anatomy, a surgical conversation surrounding new Canadian poetry, a worship of the small and the big.
The Small Machine Talks
- Publisher: The Small Machine Talks
- Total Episodes: 89
The Small Machine Talks is a monthly conversation that explores the poetry scene of Central Canada and beyond. Its hosts are Ottawa poets, Amanda Earl and a.m. kozak. The podcast features interviews with poets, publishers, and literary event organizers, discussions of recent and upcoming poetry events, calls for submission, talks on poetics, recent issues of online and print journals, books and chapbooks and sometime in the future, topics of interest to writers and readers of poetry. The podcast is part of AngelHousePress, a Canadian micropress that publishes raw talent, ragged edges and rebels in the form of chapbooks, two online magazines, a transgressive prose imprint, DevilHouse, and an essay series.
Konn Lavery Audiobooks
- Publisher: Konn Lavery
- Total Episodes: 55
Award-winning Canadian author Konn Lavery’s work is recognized by Edmonton’s top five bestseller charts and by reviewers such as Readers’ Favorite, Wishing Shelf Awards, and Literary Titan. After graduating from graphic design college, he began professionally pursuing his writing with his first release, Reality. He continues to write in the thriller, horror, and fantasy genres. Konn’s visual communication skills and musical interests have been transcribed into the formatting, artwork, and supporting audio found within his publications supporting his fascination of transmedia storytelling.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909-1922 by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 – 1942)
- Publisher: LibriVox
- Total Episodes: 54
L.M. Montgomery was a Canadian author, best known for a series of novels that began with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. Once published, Anne of Green Gables was an immediate success. The central character, Anne, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 500 short stories and poems. Because many of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island in Canada, Canada and the Canadian province became literary landmarks. (Introduction by Wikipedia) Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 – 1942)
- Publisher: LibriVox
- Total Episodes: 36
Lucy Maud Montgomery (L.M. Montgomery) was a prolific Canadian writer of books and short stories for children and adults during the first half of the twentieth century. Her writings, frequently set in Prince Edward Island where she was born and grew up, helped to put Canada on the literary map and made her a famous and beloved author, both during her own life and after her death. She published hundreds of short stories and twenty novels; her public-domain short stories have been collected in chronological order by Project Gutenberg. This project consists of stories published in 1904.Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922(Summary by Project Gutenberg)
In a Steamer Chair and Other Stories by Robert Barr (1849 – 1912)
- Publisher: LibriVox
- Total Episodes: 44
Thirteen short stories by one of the most famous writers in his day. Robert Barr was a British Canadian short story writer and novelist, born in Glasgow, Scotland. In London of the 1890s Barr became a more prolific author – publishing a book a year – and was familiar with many of the best selling authors of his day, including Bret Harte and Stephen Crane. Most of his literary output was of the crime genre, then quite in vogue. When Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were becoming well known, Barr published in the Idler the first Holmes parody, “The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs” (1892), a spoof that was continued a decade later in another Barr story, “The Adventure of the Second Swag” (1904) (For these two stories, see in LibriVox Barr’s The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont). Despite the jibe at the growing Holmes phenomenon Barr and Doyle remained on very good terms. Doyle describes him in his memoirs Memories and Adventures as, “a volcanic Anglo – or rather Scot American, with a violent manner, a wealth of strong adjectives, and one of the kindest natures underneath it all.” (Summary by Wikipedia and David Wales)
Something Like Love: A Literary Podcast
- Publisher: Shelley A. Leedahl
- Total Episodes: 30
This is an eclectic literary podcast created by multi-genre Canadian writer Shelley A. Leedahl ( https://www.writersunion.ca/member/shelleya-leedahl ) featuring poetry and prose from her 12 books, plus new material and music, with new episodes released each Wednesday. The 10 episodes in Season 1 concerned fictional teenaged characters in edgy situations learning how to navigate life and love in various dimensions, and learning how to love themselves along the way. Some of these short stories were earlier broadcast on CBC Radio Saskatchewan. Each episode included a writing prompt and Leedahl’s original music. Season 1 was funded by the Canada Council for the Arts via the Digital Originals Grant Program, and it was professionally produced by Zak Cohen. Season 2 episodes are based on random themes, and include a cover song, poetry or prose, and a guided meditation. Leedahl writes, performs, and produces.
How to Cook Fish by Olive Green
- Publisher: Loyal Books
- Total Episodes: 43
One hundred simple fish sauces. Sixty-five ways to cook mackerel. The Catching of Unshelled Fish. Twenty-seven ways to Cook Frogslegs. Now that should certainly make you reach for your apron and fish knife! How to Cook Fish by Olive Green is a vintage culinary classic, filled with simple, easy to follow recipes rendered in a terse, no nonsense style. There’s none of this fiddling with scales, weights and measures. What you get is a mélange of interesting, unusual ways to cook seafood without worrying about lists of ingredients, timings, temperature or any of the conventions followed by traditional cookbooks. If you’ve read that old Victorian favorite, Lavender and Old Lace (which was later adapted very successfully as Arsenic and Old Lace) by Myrtle Reed, you’d certainly be interested to know that the author had an equally successful career as a writer of popular cook books. Writing under the pseudonym Olive Green, Reed published six very successful books on cooking. However, from 1898 to her suicide in 1911, she continuously published at least one novel every year. The books are romantic and highly emotional in nature, full of unrequited passion, revenge, mystery and supernatural happenings. She also wrote a collection of stories about important women who made a difference to society. In between, she wrote pamphlets, married her Canadian pen-pal, suffered severe and debilitating bouts of insomnia and engaged in charity work. Her cookbooks are characterized by interesting tips on home making and the art of cooking, peppered with literary nuggets and quotations, witty remarks and anecdotes, all of which make How to Cook Fish not just an excellent recipe book but also an interesting and entertaining read. She also provides lists of what fish are in season during particular times of year, thus ensuring that the cook uses only the freshest of ingredients. How to Cook Fish is divided into 45 chapters. The One Hundred Fish Sauces are arranged in alphabetical order, starting with “Admiral Sauce” and ending with “White Sauce.” In between you have recipes for “Brown Tomato Sauce” “Sicilian Sauce” and other such unusual concoctions. Under the chapter One Hundred Miscellaneous Recipes you have items such as Fish a la Brunswick, Chartreuse of Fish, Jellied Fish Salad and many other great variations. This is indeed a great addition to your kitchen library and the clear, simple way in which the recipes are presented would tempt even the least adventurous of cooks to try a hand at one of these delicious sounding creations.
The Big Idea
- Publisher: RTHK.HK
- Total Episodes: 170
Our presenters Douglas Kerr, Vanessa Collingridge and guests explore the history, meaning and significance of ideas in contemporary society. ********************************************************************************* The whole series of the Big idea is available in our podcast station Podcast: Weekly update and available after its broadcast. ********************************************************************************* Douglas Kerr Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses in literature and rhetoric. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1979. He was born and brought up in Scotland, but went to Cambridge University in 1969 to read Modern Languages and English, and then moved on to the University of Warwick, where he studied English and French literary responses to the First World War, leaving with a PhD in Comparative Literature. During this time, a penurious year working in the French National Library in Paris gave him a taste for living some distance from home. He satisfied this taste by moving to Hong Kong, and has been here ever since. A continuing scholarly interest in the literature of the Great War eventually produced a book on the English war poet Wilfred Owen, and this was published by Oxford University Press in 1993. This was followed by George Orwell, published by Northcote House in their Writers and their Work series. Living first in colonial and then in postcolonial Hong Kong, it is no surprise that he became deeply interested in the way Asia (or the East, or the Orient) was experienced by foreigners, and this became the subject of his next book, Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing, published by Hong Kong University Press in 2008. Like many others, Douglas had first encountered the Sherlock Holmes stories as a child, but it was a lot later that he began working on their author, Arthur Conan Doyle. Though he is best known for his detective fiction, Conan Doyle was a prolific writer in all sorts of genres and subjects, and an important figure in the cultural history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Douglas's book Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession and Practice, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2013, is a “cultural biography” of Conan Doyle and a study of all his writing. Douglas is a regular book reviewer for the South China Morning Post, and was on the Board of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival for five years; he still acts as an Advisor to the Festival. Though Hong Kong is a small place and he has been a resident here for more than thirty years, like other professors he still has a tendency to get lost. Vanessa Collingridge Vanessa graduated from Oxford University in 1990 with a first class honours degree in Geography and started working in television, quickly moving into the field of science, environment and history which remain her passion both on and off screen. Since then, she has been a regular face on all the major UK TV channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5), along with Discovery and The Learning Channel (USA) and The History Channel (worldwide). In Spring 2007, she took over the chair of the long-running weekly series Making History, the flagship history series for BBC Radio 4. Her 4x1hr documentary series, Captain Cook – Obsession and Discovery (2007-8) based on her best-selling book, has now won five major international awards including a Canadian “Gemini” (“Oscar”) for Best History Programme, Australia’s prestigious National Culture Award and the Sydney Morning Herald Readers’ Award for Best History Programme. The series has so far been screened in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, North & South America, North Africa and most of Europe. A former columnist for the Daily Telegraph, The Scotsman and BBC History magazine, she writes a monthly column for BBC Who Do You Think You Are magazine along with features for the national newspapers, particularly the Daily Mail, Scotsman and Sunday Herald. A reviewer for The Literary Review, her own books include Captain Cook (2002), Boudica (2005) and The Story of Australia (2008) plus multiple chapters for Thames & Hudson’s Seventy Greatest Journeys in History and The Greatest Explorers in History (2010). Vanessa is currently researching her PhD on the history of cartography of the Great Southern Continent (Antarctica), based at Glasgow University and Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. She lectures on science, history, geography, presentation skills and the media across the UK, including at Cambridge, Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, the RGS and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. She is a Fellow of the RGS and RSGS and co-founder & host of Glasgow’s Café Scientifique to stimulate debate between the scientific community and the general public. She is a regular speaker at Book Festivals including Edinburgh International Book Festival, Cheltenham and Christchurch (New Zealand). She is director of her own production company, Monster Media Productions, which makes radio and television programmes for broadcast and corporate clients; the company also provides a range of training for media and presentation skills. She moved to Hong Kong in November 2010 with her husband and four young sons from where she continues to write and broadcast, and research her PhD.
The Golden Dream by Robert Michael Ballantyne
- Publisher: Loyal Books
- Total Episodes: 29
A young Englishman struck by Gold Fever! He is desperate to travel to California and become part of the great gold rush. He journeys to this remote and unfamiliar place and there he discovers the true value of gold, humanity and God. The Golden Dream by RM Ballantyne is one of more than one hundred books written for young adults by this Scottish author. Published in 1861, the book follows the glorious tradition of Victorian adventure sagas which emerged from the great discoveries that were made during this time, as England began colonizing distant lands. Robert Michael Ballantyne was also a gifted painter whose works were exhibited in some of the most important galleries in Europe and Scotland. He came from an eminent family of journalists and publishers and his uncle James Ballantyne was Sir Walter Scott’s publisher. The family’s wealth disappeared with the financial crisis that struck England in the late 19th century. Young Robert was compelled to abandon his studies and travel to Canada in search of employment. He wrote long and detailed letters home to his mother to ward off homesickness and this was what probably sparked the writing talent in him. Many of his Canadian and American experiences formed the basis for his writing. He returned to Scotland aged 22 and in the next year itself, his first book, titled Hudson’s Bay or Life in the Wilderness of North America was published. It achieved instant success and there was no looking back after that. He published a series of adventure stories which appealed to both young and old. His most famous work, The Coral Island, is still read with great pleasure even today. Ballantyne was a meticulous and painstaking writer, who was extremely particular about getting the details right in his books. In fact, though The Coral Island was such a grand success, he’d made a minor mistake in it while referring to the thickness of coconut shells and this haunted him for years! In future works, he ensured that he researched every single fact thoroughly before putting it down. One writer who owed a deep literary debt to Ballantyne was another famous Victorian adventure story-teller, Robert Louis Stevenson. In fact, he never lost an opportunity to confess how much The Coral Island had inspired his own book, Treasure Island. In his preface, Stevenson writes a laudatory poem praising writers like Ballantyne who provided the vision for such novels. The Golden Dream is packed with authentic details about gold mining and the social milieu of the era. Ned Sinton is a memorable young hero, filled with curiosity and pluck, who follows his dream into an unknown and faraway land. An exciting read!
Michael Ondaatje
- Publisher: iTunes U Podcast Owner
- Total Episodes: 2
The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and sister, to England. At 19, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada; he has since become a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje first won recognition as a poet. His collected poems, There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do, won the Governor-General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize, in 1979. He moved from poetry to fiction with unconventional books such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, combining prose and poetry, fact and fiction, text and image. His masterpiece, The English Patient, is an epic romantic tragedy, set in Egypt and Italy during the Second World War. This novel pierced the hearts of readers around the world and received the Booker Prize, the highest literary honor in the British Commonwealth. The 1996 film adaptation received nine Oscars, including the year’s prize for Best Picture.
Michael Ondaatje
- Publisher:
- Total Episodes: 2
The brilliant novelist, poet and literary innovator Michael Ondaatje was born on the island nation of Ceylon (now the independent republic of Sri Lanka) to parents of Indian and Dutch descent. When Ondaatje was nine his parents separated, and his mother took him, along with his brother and sister, to England. At 19, Ondaatje immigrated to Canada; he has since become a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje first won recognition as a poet. His collected poems, There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do, won the Governor-General’s Award, Canada’s highest literary prize, in 1979. He moved from poetry to fiction with unconventional books such as The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter, combining prose and poetry, fact and fiction, text and image. His masterpiece, The English Patient, is an epic romantic tragedy, set in Egypt and Italy during the Second World War. This novel pierced the hearts of readers around the world and received the Booker Prize, the highest literary honor in the British Commonwealth. The 1996 film adaptation received nine Oscars, including the year’s prize for Best Picture.
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