Bill Swainson

Bill Swainson read English at Leeds University and has worked in publishing since 1976, at John Calder (Publishers) Ltd (1976-80), Allison & Busby (1980-87), Fourth Estate (1987-88) and the Harvill Press (1989-1995). He has also worked as a freelance editor and literary consultant (1996-2000).

In 2000 he joined Bloomsbury, a leading independent publisher (winner of the 1999 and 2000 Publisher of the Year awards), where he is currently Senior Commissioning Editor. He publishes non-fiction and fiction in English and in translation, including books by Mourid Barghouti, Javier Cercas, Carlos Fuentes, Amin Maalouf, Tomás Eloy Martínez, José Luís Peixoto, Boualem Sansal, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Delphine de Vigan.

He has been a literary adviser to the British Centre for Literary Translation, a member of the Arts Council Translation Advisory Group, and is currently a board member of The Poetry Translation Centre. He has been a very valuable and enthusiastic contributor to New Spanish Books since the early days.

1. When you started in the industry at John Calder Publishers, did you immediately know that you wanted a career in publishing?

I was so keen to start in publishing that I got myself a job before I took finals in Leeds, but reality caught up with me abruptly when I presented myself for my first day’s work – perhaps it was naïve to think that a second bottle of wine at lunch was normal. ‘Mr X doesn’t work here anymore,’ said the receptionist, ‘and what’s more he did not tell us about you.’ Welcome to London! I found work in a bookshop which was the best thing you can do if you want to understand the business, but part of me was also still hankering after an academic life and specifically an MPhil in Critical Theory at Essex, which at the time was about the only university in the country that seemed aware of what was happening in Europe and especially France, with Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, for example, as well as Freud and Marx featuring on the reading list. But my father didn’t want an eternal student on his hands, so I went back to the bookshop and continued to look for a publishing job. Eventually, I was offered two on the same day; one a properly paid job working for a reputable but rather stuffy publishing company outside London, the other (‘I couldn’t possibly pay you more than you are already earning’) working for John Calder in London. There was no competition, especially when my first task turned out to be to organise John’s bookshelves on which I found works by Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva, Debord – all those I would have encountered on that post-graduate course – right there in my hands, not to mention new texts by Beckett, Burroughs, Duras and the wonderful Irish writer Aidan Higgins.

2. Today as commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

The enjoyment of the job, my terrific colleagues and the pleasure of working on a wide range of books. Since January this year, for example, I have published or been working on books by Izzeldin Abuelaish, Mourid Barghouti, Javier Cercas, Amin Maalouf, Tomás Eloy Martínez, plus Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany and A. C. Grayling’s The Good Book: A Secular Bible. And then there is also the possibility that today might be the day you find an exciting new writer.

3. What made you interested in publishing in translation?

When I was at school we studied Latin, French and German, and in those days literary texts were used from early on. So, yes, we read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, but also Ovid and Horace, and later on de Maupassant, Duhamel, Gide, stories by Heinrich Böll etc., as well as English literature. When I was first away at school, every Sunday evening the head master would read to us in the dining room before we went to bed. It might be the Odyssey or it might be W. H. Davies’s Memoirs of a Super Tramp or Erich Kästner’s Emile and the Detectives; he was a good reader and so it never occurred to me to make a distinction between literature in English and literature in translation. It was all there to be enjoyed.

4. Who was the first foreign author you published?

The first foreign author I took on was W. G. Sebald in the early ’90s, when I was working with Christopher MacLehose at the Harvill Press. I met Max, as Sebald was known, at the British Centre for Literary Translation in Norwich where I had been invited to be on their literary advisory panel. After the first meeting, the Polish poet Adam Czerniawski, who I knew slightly, took me aside and said, ‘You must read Die Ausgewanderten. Max would never put himself forward, but it’s an important book and it should be published in English.’ I had it read by two young English poets who were living and working in Germany: John Hartley Williams at the Free University in Berlin and Michael Hulse, who became the translator of Max’s first three books, at Deutsche Welle in Cologne. Both were quick to spot that Sebald was doing something new, that he was engaging with the past, and especially Germany’s past, in a way quite different from that of his contemporaries and in the process creating something new in literature. Harvill published Die Ausgewanderten as The Emigrants in 1996 and right from the beginning it was clear that a major new writer had arrived.

5. What catches your eye when scanning foreign markets?

Writers who are serious about their work, but not necessarily only serious, who want to make sense of the world, celebrate it, castigate it, understand it, make fun of it, and who are in for the long game. Working with an author over a number of books, building up his or her reputation and then keeping their books in front of the reading public is one of the most rewarding and useful things an editor can do.

6. You travel to Spain frequently. Can you name one significant difference between the Spanish and UK publishing scenes?

Well apart from the weather and the exuberance (well, perhaps, you bring that with you – the weight seems to lift from your shoulders as you touch down in Madrid or Barcelona) and the sense that the world’s literature is there for everyone to enjoy, the most significant difference is the absence of discounting – that there is a book trade culture and structure that makes it possible to publish with real confidence across a range of subjects. If your standard discount is nearer 30% than 50% you can breathe more easily. Also, a personal enthusiasm, the essay, whether as a 5,000-word article or a 50,000-word book is part of the culture, just as it is in France.

7. Since you took part in the first NSB expert’s panel back in spring 2007, more than 2000 books, 200 publishers and 50 panelists have been involved in the project. From your point of view what’s the single most important contribution of NSB to the industry?

NSB has provided encouragement and practical advice to British publishers, maintained high standards through the panel of experts who try to identify between 10 and 20 excellent new books every half year with a good chance of finding publishers, but above all by creating a sense of shared excitement in the success of the Spanish-language writers who British publishers have taken on. In this way, NSB is a fantastically useful resource and has made itself a model for how a country can champion its literature abroad.

8. Do you think the UK market will one day overcome the 3% publishing in translation barrier?

For me this is a bit of a rogue statistic that has become almost counter-productive. It’s true that the English-speaking world translates fewer books than other countries, and that’s definitely our loss. I’m not interested in making excuses, but I do think it’s important to look at things objectively. More books are published in English than any other language (though Spain can’t be far behind!) and therefore it would be interesting to know how many foreign books would need to be published in English for that 3% to become, say, the 30+% of some European countries. Then, if we concentrate on fiction alone, in addition to what is published by writers from Britain and the US, there is a wealth of English-Language novels arriving from all over the world, so it’s not surprising that the competition to be published in this market at all is exceedingly tough.

Having said that, the really interesting question for me is this: are British publishers finding the best foreign-language books they can and publishing them well in good English translations? When I began working in publishing, translated books, with honourable exceptions like Pasternak, Grass and Tomasi di Lampeudsa, were not really welcomed in bookshops, again with honourable exceptions. But something happened in the mid-1980s with the creation of Waterstone’s and the idea of a chain of quality bookshops. With the emphasis on ‘range and depth’, Waterstone’s and other such chains helped enlarge the market for good books and especially for translated books. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a huge stimulus to this trend. Suddenly we were hearing about and could (re)discover the lost Europe and its literature, and that sense of optimism – wonderfully symbolised by the Barcelona Olympics, for example – extended to our view of the whole of Europe and even the rest of the world.

So we have a rather startling contradiction: on the one hand translated literature makes up a tiny proportion of UK publishing, but simultaneously (especially when one thinks of the work of the Harvill Press, Granta, Portobello, Faber, Penguin and Picador, for example, as well as that of the smaller independent presses like Serpent’s Tail, Alma/One World Classics and the excellent newcomer, Peirene Press), one could also say that the last thirty years have consituted a golden age of translation.

You are a social media user, how relevant have bloggers and social networks become for publishers today?

Personally, I think the distribution of e-book reading devices (eg Kindle, Sony, I-pad, etc) will reach a tipping point this year, as personal computers did in the ’90s, and not solely in terms of their distribution but also of their use; Bloomsbury’s own e-book sales have increased significantly in the last year.

The e-world provides a terrific range of tools for marketing and promotion. At Bloomsbury, we are already using viral marketing of all kinds: Tweeting; Q&As, interviews and videos on our website and further afield; social networking (encouraging our authors who are on Facebook to let their friends know about their new books; while as an editor I promote events from IQ2 and festivals to smaller seminars etc. to my friends); and, of course, we work with the ‘literary’ and other bloggers, some of whom have serious followings. For example Dovegrey Reader (35,000 visits in last two months), Stuck-in-a-Book, Cornflower and other quality bloggers are attracting large followings, so already we can see that a process of selection is developing organically on the web.

9. Is technology changing what people write and/or what people read? (Ie, shorter stories than before)

The big change has yet to happen, for two reasons: today’s ‘heaviest’ book buyers are still those for whom books were the main way of studying and for whom they remain a key form of entertainment, while for my children’s generation, now in their late twenties, the internet has made big changes. Now there are any number of different means of study and devices for entertainment, not so much competing as omnipresent. That’s where the change will come. At the moment, we’re at the stage the printed book was when the making of books escaped the monasteries. The first typefaces mimicked the gothic script of the monks in the chapter houses, and only later came the lovely, open, round typefaces like Bembo that we still use today. What will those new typefaces look like? No sé. A ver! But while we can be sure that the new genres will certainly take longer than the typefaces to develop, just as was the case with the novel, one thing we can be sure of is that the desire to recreate the world in a book – whatever form a book may take – is not going to disappear.

10. Amazon is making an entry into the Spanish market, what has been your experience with them in the UK?

It seems fairly certain that Amazon in Spain will follow the sober model of France and Germany, for example, where the maximum discount the e-tailer is allowed to give to the customer is 5%. On Amazon in the UK, where retail price maintenance disappeared nearly 15 years ago, books are sold at significant discounts – 25-50% in some cases. This puts pressure on the publisher’s margins and also makes it very hard for the high-street trade to compete and so, as the e-book begins to come into its own, the whole of the UK trade is experiencing a process of dramatic change and realignment.

11. How many books do you read per year?

I don’t honestly know and certainly don’t have time to count, but taking together manuscripts, proofs, books and proposals (where 3 or 4 proposals = one book, say), maybe 200?

12. And how many of those are for pure pleasure?

No more than 10. Not on principle, by the way, just that it’s all the time allows. Although recently, I have begun reading a chapter or two of a novel every morning before I go to work. Hisham Matar’s The Anatomy of a Disappearance is my current breakfast companion and it’s such a good book I’m not in a hurry for it to end.

13. What was the last book that really impressed you?

Well, it would have to be Javier Cercas’s The Anatomy of a Moment. It is not a difficult book to read because it is so clearly written and comes over brilliantly in Anne McLean’s lucid and lively translation. But to really understand the history of the failed coup of 23 February 1981, Cercas had to devise a style that simultaneously allowed him to tell his true story with a novelist’s flair (which he has done) and yet also to weigh up the niceties of character, motivation, context and come to finely judged conclusions (which, like a modern Plutarch, he has also done). Certainly, it requires a bit of extra concentration, but it is one of those special books that rewards the reader many times over for his or her pains.

14. You published The Anatomy of a Moment (Javier Cercas) recently to great acclaim, what’s coming next?

From Spanish: the last book by the great Argentinian journalist, newspaper editor and novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez. Called Purgatory, and with chapter titles from Dante’s Inferno, it is a brilliant novel about exile, lost love and the tricks the mind will play on itself as it refuses to let go of the chance that the vanished loved one might still be alive. It is also a wickedly subversive portrait – an alternative history, in fact – of the Argentinian dictatorship, in which UFOs, liberation theologists, burlesque dancers, and the Spanish royal couple all play a role. And it contains a memorable scene involving Orson Welles, who has been invited to make a propaganda film for the regime in the run-up to the 1978 World Cup. That scene skewers its target and also goes right to the heart of the book.

15. You would have liked to have been the author of which book?

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, although I would have preferred not to have died in a duel.

16. Any chance of seeing Bill Swainson signing his own book one day?

No, I hung up my pen when I was 21 having realised what my true métier was.

17. What is your favorite word in Spanish?

Sonrisa.