Tag: what do publishers read

Interview | Justin David and Nathan Evans, Directors, Inkandescent | Indie Publisher of the Week

Continuing BookBlast’s series of interviews with the founders of independent presses, we catch up with Justin David, the publisher at www.inkandescent.co.uk and author of The Pharmacist and Kissing the Lizard ; and Nathan Evans, the editor at www.inkandescent.co.uk and author of Threads and CNUT. His forthcoming novella, One Last Song, is due for imminent release. 

Are (were) your parents great readers? What were the books that made you fall in love with reading?

JUSTIN: Both of my parents are avid readers. As a child, I always saw my whole family with books in their hands. I wouldn’t say they exactly read widely but the act of reading was popular. Dad was always a fan the Douglas Reeman novels about Richard Bolitho and mum was much more of a Catherine Cookson and Mills and Boon type so I wasn’t exactly inspired to go and read the Canon as it were. Though both of them now read my own work.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t enjoy reading, so it’s difficult to say when and which book made me fall in love with the act of reading. What I can say is that I became more excited about reading was when I was allowed to choose my own books at the library and then when I got to secondary school we were made to read an awful lot of apocalyptic dystopian novels like John Wyndham — The Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos. And then later on I got into horror and science-fiction which meant Stephen King and J.G. Ballard, back then. I don’t think I realised there was such a thing as queer literature though it would’ve been helpful in those days to have been introduced writers like Jeanette Winterson and Patrick White. Truth be told, it was when I was at art school that I started reading the children’s fiction of Philip Ridley and his adult plays like The Fastest Clock in the Universe and the Pitchfork Disney. The college library was full of this stuff and I just swallowed it all up. That’s when I realised that there was so much more to be explored.  Continue reading Interview | Justin David and Nathan Evans, Directors, Inkandescent | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother was a voracious reader: she kept a diary of everything she had read since age about thirty. I reckon at least a book a week for fifty years +!  However love for books came equally from an inspired English teacher at Shrewsbury, F. McEachran who used to make us read T. S. Eliot out loud (as well as Goethe in German), and constantly wept with emotion when he read Shakespeare to us. Bless him.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
If you define “start” as post university, then yes.

Has your vision from when you started Galileo ten years ago changed?
Not really.  My interest has always been to make books which personally interest/inspire me rather than books which are just commercial. One hopes that one day the two will coincide.  But I’ve been in trade book publishing (prior to Galileo) long enough time to know that for the vast majority of us, profitability is the elusive butterfly.

What was the book that made you fall in love with reading?
I suppose the first book that I remember as being truly influential was Wind in the Willows, though “falling in love” may be too strong a term. Continue reading Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

Spotlight | Britain and Creative Europe: what do book editors want?

Britain is part of Europe – like it or not! Border controls do not function when it comes to words since ideas have no borders. Books in translation disseminating knowledge and cultural awareness matter more than ever as prejudice and discrimination make an unwelcome (re)appearance on the Western stage.

As part of the build up to France’s invitation of honour to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2017, a series of discussion panels – “triangular talks” – were held on Monday 13 March at the French Institute in London. Leading book editors from Germany, France and Britain met to discuss fiction, non fiction and what the future holds. Publishers, translators, agents and scouts packed out the library at the IFRU to hear them. Lucie Campos, Head of the French Book Office, chaired the discussions.

Continue reading Spotlight | Britain and Creative Europe: what do book editors want?

Interview | Eric Lane, publisher, Dedalus Books | Indie Publisher of the week

Established in 1983, Dedalus Books is a truly unique publishing house which is recognised for its quality and unorthodox taste in the esoteric, the erotic and the European. The press’s founder and MD, Eric Lane, is unashamedly intellectual. His tenacity and vision have kept Dedalus going through the lean times, and helped it to flourish during the good. Dedalus had two books on the Booker Prize longlist in 1995: Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin and Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf by David Madsen. The complete list of Dedalus prizewinners is at dedalus.com

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
No, neither of my parents were great readers. My mother grew up on a farm in southern Italy and my father in an orphanage in Surrey. They met at the end of WW2 when my teenaged mother accompanied a friend who went for a job at the RAF base in Naples. My father was doing the interviewing and offered the friend a job and also one to my mother who refused. As they were leaving my father said to his colleague, I’m going to marry that one – meaning my mother – which he did, in February 1946. My mother was nearly 20 and my father 25. My sister was born in November 1947 and I followed in September 1949. We lived in Finchley which my mother loved. We used to go every few years to Italy. In the end my mother used to speak to everyone in Italy in English with the odd word of Italian whereas my father spoke to everyone in fluent Neapolitan. My parents were very happily married for 25 years until my father died of a heart attack in 1971.Growing up I was a voracious reader but also loved sport, especially football.I was a very spontaneous child and often got in trouble at school for being ‘cheeky’.

Continue reading Interview | Eric Lane, publisher, Dedalus Books | Indie Publisher of the week

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