The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews

An illuminating collection of interviews between the prestigious Shakespeare and Company bookshop and the best writers of our time

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame, it’s long been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers.

In that tradition, determined for the bookshop to remain a place of meaningful and transformative conversation, owner Sylvia Whitman and novelist and literary director Adam Biles have hosted several hundred interviews with writers, ranging from prize-winning novelists to visionary non-fiction writers.

The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews is a selection of the best of these interviews from the last decade. Packed with warmth, sensitivity and humour, it’s a celebration of the greatest writers of our age and an insight into the lives and thoughts behind some of today’s most talked-about books.

Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast, and where he curated the podcast series Friends of Shakespeare and Company Read Ulysses. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press and was a book of the year for the Observer and Irish Times. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel Beasts of England, an anarchic sequel to Orwell’s Animal Farm, will be published by Galley Beggar Press next year.