At the time it was unusual to dedicate a full hour to a long-form interview with one author, but the format proved rewarding for both listeners and guests, who appreciated the close reading and intelligent discussion of their work.
From Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Ryzsard Kapuscinski and Mavis Gallant, to Hilary Mantel, A.S. Byatt, Chinua Achebe, Louise Erdrich and Yiyun Li, the program's guests included many of the most exciting names in contemporary literature, both established and upcoming.
Fourteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature appeared on Writers & Company, often more than once, and before they’d been awarded the prize: Saul Bellow, Wole Soyinka, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Seamus Heaney, J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Abdulrazak Gurnah.
In addition to the high-profile individual interviews that distinguished Writers & Company, the program regularly featured special series recorded on location around the world.
The 25 series, produced by Sandra Rabinovitch, sent Wachtel to such places as Brazil, Berlin 10 years after the fall of the Wall, Russia, South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, Germany during the refugee crisis, and more.
Random Illuminations, a collection of reflections, correspondence and conversations with Carol Shields (Gooselane Editions, 2007) won the Independent Publisher Book Award.
The event featured an onstage interview with Eleanor by Matt Galloway, host of CBC Radio's The Current; a conversation with two featured guests—American novelists Gary Shteyngart and Brandon Taylor—as well as surprise video and audio tributes from international writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Colm Toibin, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and Alexander Hemon.
[3] In the spring of 2024, Eleanor announced in the Sunday broadcast that the complete Writers & Company digital archive—over 1,000 hours of interviews--would be made available to the public online, free of charge, anywhere in the world, through a partnership with Simon Fraser University Library's Special Collections.