Publisher focus: Saqi Books
Pete Mitchell meets Lynn Gaspard of Saqi Books to talk about everything from her editorial choices to small publishing victories to causing controversy.
When I meet Lynn Gaspard, head of Saqi Books, she is glowing with pride. Chingiz Aitmatov's classic Kirghiz novella Jamilia - published by Saqi's fiction imprint, Telegram - has recently been picked up by Waterstones as its August Book of the Month. Word has just come in from the Birmingham New Street branch that on the promotion's first Saturday, Jamilia outsold ubiquitous erotic fiction juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey. It's a small victory, but a significant one: to see such a relatively obscure work shift more units than this year's biggest publishing success, even just for one day and in one shop, is a sweet feeling for anyone who cares about translated fiction. And it's especially sweet if, like Lynn, you're the publisher responsible. 'Imagine! It's superb,' she enthuses. 'It gives you new hope, new energy when this sort of thing happens'.
Gaspard herself cuts an elegant figure. Sitting in her office above the Al Saqi bookshop in West London's Westbourne Grove, she's clearly energised by enthusiasm for what she does, leaping up throughout our conversation to press more books into my hands, and handling her favourites with reverence and obvious pride. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who's so clearly besotted with their job, and the Aitmatov affair has clearly made this a very good day. 'You get a real thrill, a real buzz. When do you get buzzes in publishing? When you read something fabulous. When you sign something superb. When you see the first copies from the printers.'
A book by a Central Asian writer almost unknown in the West is certainly a bold choice for Book of the Month, especially when the month in question is dominated by the Olympics, but this kind of daring cross-cultural move is Saqi's bread and butter. Formed in London by Lebanese childhood friends André Gaspard and Mai Ghoussoub, the firm claims a history rather more dramatic than most bookshops or publishing houses: obstacles over the years have included wars, censorship, political instability and export embargoes. 'The biggest shock,' sighs Gaspard. 'Was in 2006, during the last war. Our warehouse was bombed. We couldn't print or ship our books... but thankfully most of our stock survived'.
Publishing and printing in Lebanon, as Saqi does, risks other vicissitudes: one never knows when writers, agents and publishers are likely to face prosecution or harassment for offending either the powers that be or perceived religious sensibilities. Gaspard shows me a book which the firm's employees only managed to get past customs by gluing some of the pages together to obscure the most provocative material. Another book, on the Druze religious community, was censored for violating a prohibition on the sect's sacred writings being published at all.
Despite the political and cultural drama in which Saqi seems so frequently entangled, Gaspard is careful to emphasise that, for her, the most important part of the job is simply to put out good books. If political interventions are made, or cross-cultural dialogue gets fostered - assuming, of course, that one could ever even measure those kinds of effects - that's simply a bonus. 'Sure,' she says. 'It's a passion and it's something you believe in - you're interested, you're curious, you want to discover another culture... If you look at what we've published over the years, we're a minorities publisher: the Druze, the Jews, the Yezidis, gays in the Arab world, women... You do want to feel like you're contributing, of course, and with fiction you're certainly contributing, but it's more subtle. Of course the message is important, but it's about literary qualities, it's about beauty first and foremost, and beauty is above politics'.
In terms of quality - or beauty, if you like - the firm's backlist speaks for itself. This year the Westbourne Press, the firm's new non-fiction imprint, scored a surprise critical smash with its very first book, Sex and Punishment: Eric Berkowitz's compendious and provocative history of, well, sex and punishment - how various forms of religious and secular authority down the ages have attempted to police, proscribe and punish the most ubiquitous and irrepressible of human urges.Berkowitz's rich and entertaining tome garnered a rave review from The Guardian's Nicholas Lezard, who made it his book of the week. Brian Whitaker's Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, has been continuously feted by journalists, Middle Eastern scholars and general readers since it came out in 2006. (For all her protestations of avoiding political provocation, Gaspard seems almost disappointed that, when the English edition was launched in Beirut, the security services failed to turn up and cause any trouble. 'Yes,' she laments, laughing at how ridiculous it is to say. 'That was a good move.')
The Telegram imprint, established in 2005, is already well established as one of the country's best publishers of translated fiction: some of its releases lately reviewed on the Booktrust Translated Fiction website include Sjon's The Whispering Muse and From the Mouth of the Whale, the latter shortlisted for this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. I ask Lynn what she's most proud of having recently brought out, and most excited about producing in the near future, and she barely knows where to begin. There's the Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri's classic For Bread Alone, translated by the great American writer and exile Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky. Accompanying this, there's the publication of Choukri's In Tangier, a memoir of his encounters with Bowles, Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet in the titular city, again translated by Bowles. There's the forthcoming Westbourne Press title, London's Overthrow by China Miéville, a polemic describing the capital in a time of austerity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, out this September; and there's The Literary Heritage of the Arabs, an anthology including some of the finest literature produced by Arab writers over the last 1500 years, out this October from Saqi.
Before I go, I ask Gaspard how she sees the outlook for the publishing industry. Like all publishers, she worries about sales, and notes that the figure that's often quoted with respect to translated books - that they represent only 3% of the UK market - isn't an encouraging one. She's thrilled with the ways in which online communities have become so important for the discussion of books, the publicity surrounding them, and the word-of-mouth recommendations which still account for such a huge slice of people's book-buying decisions: 'The online community is very important to us... I am very grateful for bloggers' loyalty and support over the years. This relationship is now central to our plans.' In all, however, Gaspard is far more excited and forward-looking about the industry's future than many publishers I've met. As she's said throughout our interview, the most important thing is to put out beautiful and astonishing books: everything else comes second. Given Saqi's success in doing just that - and their energy, their commitment and their sense of adventure - it's impossible not to feel optimistic.
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