Let us now praise independent publishers

A few days ago, Pushkin Press was awarded the 2022 British Book Award for Independent Publisher of the Year. It was entirely deserved. The award comes as Pushkin Press, under Managing Editor, India Edwards, and Publisher and Managing Director, Adam Freudenheim, celebrates its 25^thanniversary and its most successful year yet. As The Bookseller pointed out, “The indie’s numbers in Nielsen BookScan’s TMT nearly doubled, and adult sales rose faster than any other publisher in the Independent Alliance — powered by a literary rediscovery and a big prize-winner.” Sales of Ulrich Boschwitz’s thriller, The Passenger, set in Nazi Germany just after Kristallnacht , neared six figures in 2021 and gave the publisher its first Sunday Times bestseller in both hardback and paperback. In addition, David Diop’s At Night All Blood in Black won the 2021 International Booker Prize.

The Passenger , in particular, summed up many of the characteristic strengths of Pushkin Press. Since it was founded in 1997 it has championed a number of great central European and Soviet writers including Antal Szerb, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and Isaac Babel, as well as Boschwitz, who was virtually unknown before Pushkin commissioned Philip Boehm to translate The Passenger. Secondly, the stylish cover by the Spanish illustrator Riki Blanco points to another of Pushkin’s strengths, the quality of their books’ design and covers. My personal favourites are the recent Stefan Zweig covers (Journeys, 2010, and Encounters and Destinies: A Farewell to Europe, 2020), both designed by Nathan Burton, and Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories (2016), cover illustration by Joe McLaren, and Babel’s Red Cavalry (2014), cover illustration by David Pearson. Finally, Pushkin are ambitious. They don’t just translate one book by a neglected author. They translated seven books by Antal Szerb, three selections of Babel stories, all translated by Boris Dralyuk, and more than twenty books by Stefan Zweig.

Pushkin Press is not the only leading independent publisher, of course. Persephone Books, founded by Nicola Beauman in 1998, has reprinted almost 150 works of fiction and non-fiction, mostly by mid-20^th century women writers, again with a distinctive elegant look and a ‘fabric’ endpaper with matching bookmark. Titles include Helen Thomas’s moving memoir, As It Was and World Without End , Richmal Crompton ’s Family Roundabout and Manja by Anna Gmeyner. In addition, Persephone has commissioned new prefaces by well-known writers like Diana Athill, Nina Bawden, AS Byatt and Lucy Ellmann.

Notting Hill Editions was founded by the late Tom Kremer in 2009 and, again, the books have a stylish, distinctive look with quirky titles like The Paradoxal Compass: Drake’s Dilemma, Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg and How Shostakovich Changed My Mind. The books are short but pack a lot into a few pages. Dennis Marks’s Wandering Jew , a fascinating essay on Joseph Roth, is arguably the best short introduction in English to one of the great writers of the 20^th century. 

Carcanet Press, founded by Michael Schmidt and based in Manchester, is now in its fifth decade. One of Britain’s best poetry publishers (authors include Gillian Clarke, Elaine Feinstein, John Ashbery, Michael Hamburger and Elizabeth Jennings), Carcanet also publishes fiction and criticism and over the years has championed writers such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Anthony Burgess, Donald Davie, Frederic Raphael and Gabriel Josipovici as well as classics like Ford Madox Ford.  

The independent publisher that has taken the world of fiction by storm is Fiztcarraldo Editions with its blue covers. Founded by Jacques Testard (formerly a commissioning editor at Notting Hill Editions) in 2014, Fitzcarraldo has published a number of prizewinning authors. Flight (2018) by Olga Tokarczuk, was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, and, more recently, The Book of Jacob (2021), set in 18^th century Poland, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. She also won the Nobel Prize in 2018. Joshua Cohen’ s novel The Netanyahus (2021) has just been awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the 2021 Jewish Book Award. Fitzcarraldo also published Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2016), an oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russia, by Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize.

Founded in 2003, Comma Press specialises in short fiction and fiction in translation and is perhaps best known for Refugee Tales , edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus, and for the last three years running was shortlisted by The British Book Awards for “Small Press of the Year” (North of England), winning the region in 2020.

These independent publishers have several things in common. They have mostly been founded recently and are small companies with a distinctive look, a passion for neglected writers, and several have hit the jackpot by championing little-known foreign authors like Boschwitz, Szerb, Tokarczuk and Alexievich, at a time when there seems to be a growing appetite for central and east European writers and authors from the early and mid-20 ^th century. The emergence of these small publishers is one of the most exciting developments in contemporary British culture.

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