Category: Indie Publisher of the Week

BookBlast® celebrates independent publishing, publisher interview

Interview | Kelly Davio, Eyewear Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother was an avid reader in my childhood, and she taught my siblings and me to read when we were very young. I grew up in California in a house filled with books.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, I taught English at the secondary school level for many years before publishing and I found each other.

Has your vision from when Todd Swift started Eyewear Publishing four years ago evolved?
One of the most important developments for our press has been the introduction of Squint Books, our nonfiction division focusing on timely politics and pop culture titles. While poetry remains the beating heart of the press, our nonfiction books, by authors such as Okla Elliott, Sonya Huber, and Chris Jackson, have been an excellent way to reach a wider readership and, we hope, they make a real contribution to the cultural dialogue.

Continue reading Interview | Kelly Davio, Eyewear Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Roh-Suan Tung, Balestier Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I was born and grew up in Taiwan. My parents both love books and I remember lots of books surrounding me as a kid.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Yes and no. I learned how to be an editor early during the school years. I was then involved in the student movements for media freedom during around 30 years ago in Taiwan. My formal career started as a researcher and a professor in physics, in UK, USA and China. During the time, I was acting as editors for international science journals for some years. I always feel there is a need of literature and humanity publication, translating from all the languages in Asia, and I started to devote myself to Balestier Press.

Has your vision from when you started Balestier Press in 2014 changed?
The vision that there should be more books in translation from Asia remains. Since we started Balestier Press, we have received numerous encouragements and support from the writers and translators around the world.

Continue reading Interview | Roh-Suan Tung, Balestier Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Ghassan Fergiani, Darf Publishers | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My father was a teacher, a bookseller and a publisher. He was a reader. I grew up around books in our family house. My mother was not a reader of books, more of magazines, but I remember growing up listening to all the stories she told us at night time.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Growing up in Tripoli, I spent most of my time after school at my father’s bookshops, sometimes at the Arabic bookshop and sometimes at the English Language bookshops. I wasn’t the only one, my siblings and cousins were there too, so it was a bit of fun and a bit of work. When I was young I did think I would be in the book life.
 Continue reading Interview | Ghassan Fergiani, Darf Publishers | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | François von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
With a Greek mother and a Swiss/Austrian father, the bookshelves at home were the reflection of a mad continent. Goethe, Mann, Holderlin rubbing shoulders with Leigh Fermor, Kavafy and Seferis. And many biographies of T.E. Lawrence.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Loved reading ‘from the start’ but publishing is a second career, begun at age 57.

Has your vision from when you started Bitter Lemon Press 13 years ago changed?
We entered the water gingerly, with a narrow focus on translated crime fiction. We have since diversified into novels written in English, both literary crime and general literary fiction, and also added a non-fiction imprint called Wilmington Square Books. WSB publishes thoughtful and engaging books about culture and society. Continue reading Interview | François von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Ana Pérez Galván, Hispabooks | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
No, my father is a voracious newspaper reader, but not a book reader. My mother does enjoy reading now and then a good novel, but not as a habit, very much the same as my two sisters. I am a forty-one-year-old woman from Madrid. I have two kids (a boy of six, Máximo, and a girl of eight, Ada). I love reading, I love music (my taste is very eclectic), I love sculling (I row in a local rowing club) and I love my partner, with whom I’ve been nearly fifteen years now, unmarried. I don’t believe in God – I’m an apostate. I believe in solidarity, equality, tolerance and love.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Yes, I’ve always had a passion for books and since an early age was clear about my wish to work in publishing, surrounded by books.
 Continue reading Interview | Ana Pérez Galván, Hispabooks | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Anne Dolamore, co-publisher, Grub Street | Indie Publisher of the Week

Anne Dolamore started her career in publishing in the mid 1970s in the sales and marketing department at Faber & Faber, after reading English at Lancaster University. She moved to André Deutsch as one of the first women reps in London and in 1982 set up her own special sales consultancy, advising publishers such as Pan Macmillan, Harper Collins, Chatto, Bodley Head and Cape. At the end of the 1980s she wrote her first book, The Essential Olive Oil Companion, which was packaged by Grub Street and published by Macmillan. Her next book A Buyer’s Guide to Olive Oil, was published in 1994. In 1988 she joined forces with John Davies (the publisher of military aviation history books) to run Grub Street, which was voted International Cookbook Publisher of the Year at the World Cookbook Awards in 2000.

Anne was Chair of the Guild of Food Writers for two years; Chair of Sustain – the alliance for better food and farming; and Chair of the London Food Links working group for 10 years and served on the board of London Food, set up by the Mayor of London to deliver a London Food Strategy. She is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and Les Dames des Escoffier. She has written for numerous publications, has made a number of radio and TV appearances, and recorded her lifetime food memories as a contribution to the National Sound Archive. She has just completed recording for the Women in Publishing Oral History Project.

Were your parents great readers?
My parents did both read; my mother mostly fiction but my father did love poetry and when I was a child he read to me most nights from A Book of 1000 Poems. At his funeral in 2008 my daughter, Amy, read one of his favourite poems, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Brook. They did instill in me a love of reading from the earliest age, and of course I am of that generation (now 63 yrs old) where weekly visits to the local library was a rite of passage. Libraries nurtured my insatiable reading habit and made me love books. Continue reading Interview | Anne Dolamore, co-publisher, Grub Street | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Michael Schmidt, founder, Carcanet Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Founded in 1969 by Michael Schmidt, Carcanet Press is the UK’s leading poetry publisher, producing a comprehensive and diverse list of contemporary and classic poetry in English and in translation. The poetry magazine PN Review is produced from the same office.
In 2000 Carcanet was named the Sunday Times millennium Small Publisher of the Year. Four of its authors have received Nobel Prizes, nine have received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and six have received Pulitzer Prizes, among many other honours.

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My parents both read a lot of books and the house was full of books and magazines.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, I had very little idea what I wanted to do. Banking seemed a good place to be, but I never made the grade.

Has your vision from when you started Carcanet 47 years ago changed?
Yes. I started with no idea of becoming a publisher. I wanted to publish a few pamphlets and then get on with other things. It was not for some years that I realized I was a publisher faute de mieux. Continue reading Interview | Michael Schmidt, founder, Carcanet Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Clare Christian, RedDoor Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Clare Christian has worked for a number of large publishing houses including Hodder, Orion, John Wiley and Pearson. In 2005 she co-founded The Friday Project where she published In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes and bestselling non-fiction Blood, Sweat and Tea: Real Life Adventures in an Inner-city Ambulance by Tom Reynolds and Confessions of a GP by Dr. Benjamin Daniels. TFP was sold to HarperCollins in 2008 and Clare stayed on until 2009 before leaving to offer publishing consultancy services under the banner of The Book Guru. She has been developing RedDoor alongside The Book Guru since January 2014. She is a past winner of the UK Young Publisher of the Year award.

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
Both my parents read quite a bit, my dad reads mainly non-fiction and Mum, fiction. I read everything from a young age. We made weekly visits to the library and the nice librarian would order in books from other libraries once I had worked my way through all of the books on their shelves!

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, my favourite subjects at school were the sciences and English. I did a degree in Zoology and was planning a PhD but time and finances ran out and I looked to combine my love of science and my love of books and decided I would go into publishing and publish popular science books. Of course publishing doesn’t quite work like that and I am yet to publish a popular science book.
 Continue reading Interview | Clare Christian, RedDoor Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Michel Moushabeck, Interlink Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Michel S. Moushabeck is a publisher, editor, writer and musician of Palestinian descent. The founder of Interlink Books, he is also the author of several books including Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa and A Brief Introduction to Arabic Music, Most recently, he contributed a piece to Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora.

He is the recipient of NYU’s Founder’s Day Award for outstanding scholarship (1981), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Alex Odeh Award (2010) and The Palestinian Heritage Foundation Achievement Award (2011). He serves on various boards – notably the board of trustees of The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), an annual literary prize administered by the UK’s Booker Prize Foundation. He plays riqq, tabla and daff and his recording credits include two albums. He has performed at concert halls worldwide.

Michel Moushabeck is exclusively interviewed by Georgia for The BookBlast Diary.

Were your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
Yes, both my parents and my grandparents were very bookish. They lived in Palestine, in the literary neighborhood of Katamon in West Jerusalem, until their forced exile from their home in 1948. I was born in Beirut and grew up there until age 19, when the 1975 Lebanese Civil War shattered my family’s life again and sent us in search for a new home. My parents ended up in Jordan, my brother in Athens and then California, my sister in Montreal, and I managed to find my way to Brooklyn, New York and then Massachusetts. Growing up in cosmopolitan Beirut, I was brought up on a healthy diet of good books, classical Arabic music, Oum Koulthum, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Beatles, Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Egyptian cinema, and American westerns. Continue reading Interview | Michel Moushabeck, Interlink Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Cheryl Robson, Aurora Metro | Indie Publisher of the Week

Cheryl Robson is a producer/director of several short independent films, most recently ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Island’ which was nominated for Best Short Film at Raindance, London 2015. She worked at the BBC for several years and then taught filmmaking at the University of Westminster, before setting up a theatre company. She founded Aurora Metro 25 years ago and the company has published over 150 international writers. As a writer, she has won the Croydon Warehouse International Playwriting Competition, and as an editor, she recently worked with Gabrielle Kelly on Celluloid Ceiling: Women Film Directors Breaking Through, the first global overview of women film directors.

Are your parents great readers?
My mother still is a great reader and I remember reading just about everything in my school library aged ten.

Did you want to become a publisher from the start?
I worked in TV for several years then ran a theatre company before trying publishing. I am also a writer and filmmaker − publishing has the advantage of being able to move deadlines back on projects. Continue reading Interview | Cheryl Robson, Aurora Metro | Indie Publisher of the Week