Small Press Night: The Role of Small Presses in the Changing World of Publishing

Small presses are changing the face of publishing: Nicola Bauman, Meike Ziervogel and Candida Lacey discuss what this means for the future of books

By Jenny McPhee

Speakers:

Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books
Meike Ziervogel of Peirene Press
Candida Lacey of Myriad Editions
in conversation with Jenny McPhee

Nicola Beauman founded Persephone Books in 1998 to publish neglected fiction by mid-20th century women. She is the author of A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-1939 and biographies of E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Taylor and Cynthia Asquith.

Candida Lacey is Managing Director of Myriad Editions, a seedbed for new talent in literary fiction and publisher of graphic novels. Before joining Myriad in 2000, she worked as commissioning editor for Routledge, Pandora Press, HarperCollins and Jonathan Cape.

Meike Ziervogel is the founder of Peirene Books, which publishes contemporary European novellas in English translation—praised by the TLS as “literary cinema for those fatigued by film.” Her forthcoming novel, Magda, about the wife of Hitler propaganda chief Goebbels, is published by Salt this spring.

Jenny McPhee, novelist, translator and co-organizer of the Upper Wimpole Street Literary Salon, previously worked as an editor at Knopf for seven years.

Elif Shafak: Honour

Wednesday 7 November, 2012: Turkish novelist and journalist Sebnem Senyener interviews Elif Shafak, Turkey’s most widely read female novelist, about her new novel Honour. Written in English and set in London and Istanbul, Honour revolves around the aftermath of an honour killing in a Kurdish family.

When Fact and Fiction Merge: Authors Clare Clark, Lesley Downer, and Kate Williams Discuss Writing Historical Fiction

CLARE CLARK’s latest novel, Beautiful Lies (June, 2012) is set in a Jubilee year-1887- fraught with economic uncertainty, riots, and tabloid scandal mongering. Sound familiar? Praised by Hilary Mantel as “one of those writers who can see into the past and help us feel its texture”, Clark’s novel illuminates both Victorian England and our own time. Clark is also the author of The Great Stink (longlisted for the Orange Prize) and The Nature of Monsters.

LESLEY DOWNER’s latest novel, Across a Bridge of Dreams, is an epic tale of love and war in nineteenth-century Japan and is based on the true story of the “last samurai.” Downer has written many books about Japan and its culture including Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, and Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West. She has presented television programmes on Japan for Channel 4 and the BBC.

KATE WILLIAMS’ historical novel, The Pleasures of Men, is set in an 1840s London on the brink of collapse. Catherine Sorgeiul becomes obsessed with a series of murders in the East End – and unearths the terror in her soul that she has tried to forget. The Independent on Sunday wrote “The Pleasures of Men shares with Wolf Hall an ambitious, challenging concern with form combined with a pitch-perfect historical ear… This intoxicating and disturbing novel is properly thrilling and extraordinarily well-written.” Williams is also the author of England’s Mistress (2006), which was Book of the Week on Radio 4, and Book of the Year in the Times and the Independent. Becoming Queen (2008) was Book of the Year in the Tatler andSpectator. She discusses history, politics and culture regularly on television and radio, including Newsnight and the Today programme, and was the social historian on the BBC’s Restoration Home. Her most recent book is Young Elizabeth: the Making of Our Monarch published in May 2012.

Writing Family Memoir: Nancy K. Miller, Andrea Stuart, Alba Arikha

  • Nancy K Miller
  • Andrea Stewart
  • Alba Arikha

Jewish ancestors escaping pogroms in turn-of-the century Russia, white plantation slave owners and black slaves in 17th century Barbados, coming of age in the literary-artistic mileu of 1980s Paris. Three authors discuss the challenges involved in their recently completed family memoirs.

In the award-winning What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, Nancy K. Miller discovers the hidden lives of her Eastern European ancestors. Andrea Stuart’s forthcoming Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, tells a story of greed and forbidden love among her slave-owning and enslaved ancestors. Alba Arikha’s newly published memoir Major/Minor, praised by Paul Auster as “an unusually affecting book about the rage and rebellion of a stormy adolescence,” delves into the past of her artist father and other family members who survived the Holocaust.

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. Andrea Stuart is Writer in Residence at Kingston University and course director of the Faber Academy’s “Writing Family History” course. Alba Arikha is the author of two previous books, a translator of poetry and has recently recorded a CD of her own songs, “Dans Les Rues de Paris.”