Episode
Ira Wells
- Published
- Apr 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2079
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://shows.acast.com/what-happened-next-a-podcast-about-newish-books/episodes/ira-wells
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/what-happened-next-a-podcast-about-newish-books-6367402/episodes/ira-wells/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/what-happened-next-a-podcast-about-newish-books-6367402/ira-wells.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
My guest on this episode is Ira Wells. Ira’s work has appeared in The Guardian , The New Republic , The Walrus , The Globe and Mail , Literary Review of Canada , Los Angeles Review of Books , and many other publications. His books include Fighting Words: Polemics and Social Change in Literary Naturalism and Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life . His most recent book is On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy , published by Biblioasis in 2025. That book is a finalist for the 2026 Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Quill & Quire called it “a testament to the life-altering power of books and ideas.” Ira and I talk about the sense of cultural fear and helplessness that seems to be behind the resurgence of book banning, about how his book was inspired, not by a conservative drive to ban books, but by a so-called “library audit” at a school in the heart of progressive Toronto, and about his return to biography for his next book project. This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock , in partnership with The Walrus . Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky . Used with permission. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.