Blackwell's Book Podcasts

Blackwell's Book podcasts bring a fantastic selection of in-depth author interviews straight to your PC. Packed full with over 30 minutes of insight into some of the most fascinating titles available, you'll find a brand new podcast available on our website every two weeks. Listen to the show as you browse the internet or work at your PC, or download the file to transfer to your iPod/MP3 player and take it with you wherever you go!

Listen to the content that interests you!

While we believe that we will bring you some of the best author interviews around, we appreciate that not all titles are to everybody's taste. Therefore, if you don't want to listen to the full show, you can listen to or download the segments that interest you the most. And if you do find a title that is really up your street, you'll find easy links to buy the featured title.

Scroll down to view our most recent podcasts or browse by category via the left-hand menu.

You can also subscribe to Blackwell's Book Podcasts via iTunes or through our YouTube Channel. Simply search for 'Blackwell Online' in the search box on the iTunes Podcasts page or click the 'Subscribe' button on YouTube.

Podcast 70 - P. D. James - Death Comes to Pemberley

For our final podcast of 2011 we are delighted to welcome a very special guest - doyenne of English crime novelists, PD James. In the interview, Baroness James talks about her lifelong passion for the works in Jane Austen, a passion that this autumn resulted her publishing Death Comes to Pemberley, a murder mystery set on Darcy's country estate which reveals the later lives - and some of the secrets - of Austen's characters in Pride and Prejudice.

Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Podcast 69 - Books of the Year

In our penultimate podcast of 2011, George Miller asks four guests to select their books of the year, which produces a wonderfully varied crop of recommendations, from philosophy and science to crime fiction and one of Blackwell's surprise bestsellers of the year, a novel entitled New Finnish Grammar. George's guests on the programme are memoirist Judy Golding, philosopher Julian Baggini, and Blackwell's own Zool Verjee, events manager, and Euan Hirst, academic manager.

Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Podcast 68 - Matthew Sweet - The West End Front

The West End Front takes us behind the scenes at London's grandest hotels during the Second World War to reveal a world within a world, populated by an amazing cast of characters – aristocrats, foreigners in exile, conmen, abortionists, spies, politicians, communists, journalists, top military men and secret service agents – not forgetting a thriving gay subculture in the bar beneath the Ritz. In this interview, writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet tells our host George Miller about how he uncovered some of their amazing wartime stories.

Buy The West End Front

Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Podcast 67 - Rosamund Bartlett - Tolstoy: A Russian Life

The last major life of Tolstoy in English was by A.N. Wilson and appeared over twenty years ago. Now available in paperback is Rosamund Bartlett's acclaimed life of the writer published to mark the centenary of his death in 1910. Of this new book, A.N. Wilson himelf wrote that it "conveys Tolstoy to me more vividly than any biography I have read... at every stage of Tolstoy's life we feel ourselves in a gigantic presence". In this interview, Rosamund Bartlett discusses Tolstoy's life and times.

Buy Tolstoy: A Russian Life

Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Podcast 66 - Alexander Masters - The Genius in My Basement

For his first book, Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters took as his subject a homeless man he had befriended. That book went on to win the Guardian First Book Award and was made into a successful BBC TV film. For his new book, Masters found his subject beneath his own floorboards, in the shape of Simon Norton, an eccentric Cambridge maths genius who lived downstairs. In this interview, Alexander reflects on his unorthodox approach to biography and the particular challenges that Simon presented to the writer.

Buy The Genius in My Basement

Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com