Poets & Writers Theater

In this CBS Mornings video, Oprah Winfrey announces her new book club pick The Covenant of Water (Grove Press, 2023) by Abraham Verghese, who speaks about his writing process, how his work as a physician feeds into his writing, and how his family’s history inspired his new novel. For more, read “The Great Lie That Tells the Truth: A Q&A With Abraham Verghese” by Naheed Phiroze Patel.

“An unhappy childhood is a treasure for a writer,” says Hilary Mantel in this CBS Saturday Morning interview about her story collection Learning to Talk, which was first published in England in 2003 and published in the U.S. for the first time by Henry Holt this month. The stories feature young characters growing up in mid-twentieth-century England and are inspired by Mantel’s childhood.

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.” The life of Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison is remembered through this 2004 interview for CBS Sunday Morning highlighting what was most important to her: being a mother and a writer. Morrison died at the age of eighty-eight on August 5, 2019.

In 1960 Carl Sandburg, the poet, journalist, Lincoln biographer, and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, appeared on CBS's “What’s My Line?” which ran from 1950 to 1967, the year Sandburg died.

Philip Roth recently granted a relatively rare interview to CBS on the occasion of the publication earlier this month of Nemesis, his thirty-first book.