She was the host of the flagship literary show Writers & Company on CBC Radio One, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in October 2015.

[1] Her interviews for Writers & Company are in-depth portraits of literary figures which over the years have included Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Mordecai Richler.

Interested in books and reading from an early age, she was introduced by her Grade 8 teacher to the works of Shakespeare and Emily Brontë.

[2] She studied English literature at McGill University,[4] where she worked for the student newspaper and was on the executive of the Undergraduate Literary Society.

[2] After living in Kenya, and the United States, she moved in the mid-1970s to Vancouver, where she worked as a freelance writer and broadcaster.

Wachtel has co-edited two books: The Expo Story (1986), and Language in Her Eye (1990), and is the co-author of A Feminist Guide to the Canadian Constitution (1992).