Mostly Books Meets...

Show Notes

It is our great pleasure to welcome onto the podcast this week Liz Calder and Alexandra Pringle. Liz was one of the founding directors of Bloomsbury and was editor-in-chief from 1987 to the year 2000, after which she passed the baton on to Alexandra, who served in the role until 2020. Between them, they have published Nobel Prize, Booker Prize and Women's Prize winners and have published household names such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Madeline Miller. Together they have edited the Bloomsbury 35 Anthology, a celebration of the now much-loved and admired publisher. To flick through its pages is to meet some of the most exciting voices in fiction writing from across the world, and is a testament to the brilliant work Bloomsbury has and continues to do.

(0:49) Introduction
(3:20) Liz Calder and Alexandra Pringle’s First Reading Experiences
(8:37) Liz and Alexandra’s Teenage Years
(15:41) Liz Calder's Most Recent Read
(22:21) Alexandra Pringle’s Most Recent Read
(26:14) The Books That Changed Their Lives
(38:35) The Emotional Side of Publishing

The podcast is produced and presented by Jack Wrighton @jackwrighton and the team at Mostly Books. It is edited by Story Ninety-Four. Find us on Twitter @mostlyreading & Instagram @mostlybooks_shop.

Bloomsbury 35 is published in the UK by Bloomsbury.

Books mentioned in this episode include:
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery - ISBN: 9780349009308
Bartleby and Co by Enrique Vila-Matas - ISBN: 9781843430520
The Great Garden by Meg Rozoff - ISBN: 9781841585659
My Salinger Days by Joanna Rakoff - ISBN: 9780307958013
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan - ISBN: 9780393017755
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - ISBN: 9780395775592
The Ventriloquist Tale by Pauline Melville - ISBN: 9780747531500
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie - ISBN: 9780593421826

To find more titles to purchase, visit our website

Creators & Guests

Host

Mostly Books

Award-winning indie bookshop in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

What is Mostly Books Meets...?

Welcome to Mostly Books Meets, a podcast by the independent bookshop, Mostly Books. Booksellers from an award-winning indie bookshop chatting books and how they have shaped people's lives, with a whole bunch of people from the world of publishing - authors, poets, journalists and many more. Join us for the journey.

Sarah Dennis 0:24
Welcome to Mostly Books Meets... We the team at Mostly Books, are an award-winning independent bookshop in Abingdon. In this podcast series, we'll be speaking to authors, journalists, poets, and a range of professionals from the world of publishing. We'll be asking about the books that are special to them, from childhood favourites to the book that changed their life and we hope you'll join us for the journey.

Jack Wrighton 0:49
It is my great pleasure to welcome onto the podcast this week, two giants of the publishing industry, Liz Calder and Alexandra Pringle. Liz was one of the founding directors of Bloomsbury and was editor-in-chief from 1987 to the year 2000, after which she passed the baton on to Alexandra, who served in the role until 2020. Between them they have published Nobel Prize, Booker Prize and Women's Prize winners and have published household names such as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje, Susannah Clark, Camilla Shamsi and Madeline Miller. This is not to mention their many achievements outside of Bloomsbury and in the wider publishing industry. Together they have edited the Bloomsbury 35 Anthology, a celebration of the now much-loved and admired publisher, which started life in 1986, in a small office above a Chinese restaurant in Putney. To flick through its pages is to meet some of the most exciting voices in fiction writing from across the world, and is a testament to the brilliant work Bloomsbury has and continues to do. Liz and Alexandra, welcome to Mostly Books Meets. So on Mostly Books Meets we love to, you know, explore our guests, sort of reading history, what their history and where their love of reading the written word and books came from. Starting with you, Liz, am I right in saying you grew up in New Zealand, is that correct?

Liz Calder 2:28
Yes, from the age of 11. My parents emigrated from London in 1949 and I was 11 and we went and my father became a farmer. So that was the point of the exercise. But it was an unforgettable experience.

Jack Wrighton 2:49
Yes, I imagine, and was it before moving to New Zealand that you got into reading? Or is that something you discovered sort of while you were there?

Liz Calder 2:58
No, my mother was absolutely avid reader, a great lover of books and what I can remember most clearly was I had a bad case of tonsillitis when I was about six and I was in hospital for it and she came into the hospital with a great suitcase, absolutely packed with books, I couldn't believe it. In fact, like, I think I thought they were all new books, but they weren't. They were all books she brought from home. Anyway, one of them she started reading to me and that was the book I first I remember reading myself because she started reading it out loud and I was so grabbed and captured by it, that I took the book from her quite firmly and reading it myself and that was Anne of Green Gables by Ella Montgomery, which is of course, loved by very, very many.

Jack Wrighton 3:59
In terms of a childhood book that's, you know, well loved and well remembered Anne of Green Gables has come up a lot on the podcast, as you know, a sort of, an initial experience of reading.

Liz Calder 4:12
So they're a very strong character.

Jack Wrighton 4:15
Yes, yes, yeah, and I must confess shamefully, it's not one I've read myself, but I'm right. It's quite a rural setting, isn't it in Anne of Green Gables and did that... you know you said you came across that when you were six. Did that sort of also have extra significance when you moved to New Zealand because I presume if farming was the reason...

Liz Calder 4:38
It didn't really because the farm, we had a sheep farm weren't living in a village whereas Anne was living in a small village of Avonlea and so village life was much more part of her world than mine.

Jack Wrighton 4:57
And moving over to you Alexandra. Where did you I grew up and where did your sort of love of the written word stem from?

Alexandra Pringle 5:04
So I was born in a tiny cottage in Chelsea, in 1953 and it was, in those days, it was a working-class street, it had no bathroom, it had a lavatory in the garden in the shed and Chelsea with a very different place and I was very resistant to learning to read or anything really very much, but particularly reading and I remember my mother desperately trying to get me to read and me saying, I don't want to learn and then the minute it happened, you know, when I was about six or something, it was like this extraordinary door opening. Actually the first book I remember reading was the hell of reading Janet and John, which I think is why I was taking so long to read, it's about the most boring book ever. But the first, a massively important book to me, I used to go to Chelsea library, and I just read my way through a new in that way that library, you just pick up books, you don't know what you're reading, and I picked up a book called The Turf Cutters Donkey by Patricia Lynch and I found out later it was illustrated by Jack Yates, which is rather amazing and it was first published in the 1930s and I don't know what it was that attracted me to it and I became so obsessed. I read... she wrote about 30-something Turf Cutters Donkey books, and they were leprechauns and magic and I realise that my publishing, I have a sort of strand of magic publishing like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Madeline Miller and so on and I think that all comes from those, you know, there's early books, I mean, obviously, C.S. Lewis, but the Irish books were wonderful and I desperately wanted to be Irish, and I found out later that she was an amazing woman and a staunch Republican and were sent by Sylvia Pankhurst to port on the Easter Risings in 1960. So she's obviously an amazing woman, but obviously, I didn't know that then.

Jack Wrighton 7:08
No, no, I find the wonderful thing about those books that really speak to you when your child is it's, it's always an ongoing relationship with them, you know, as you grow up, and maybe you learn more about the, you know, the writer's private life, or who they were or their, you know, their politics, you realise that you sort of grow with them, you know, even if they're, you know, a writer from the past that you know, that relationship never ends, really, that when you learn about the various different aspects of who they were.

Alexandra Pringle 7:39
The only other person I've ever met, who's read Patricia Lynch's is the novelist, Esther Freud, who read her when she was growing up because her mother was Irish. So that's a bond we've always had.

Jack Wrighton 7:53
Yes, yeah. So you found then that, you know, as a name isn't as sort of well known as other, you know, in terms of people sort of charged reading or yeah, maybe more so in Ireland.

Alexandra Pringle 8:09
Yes, she's very famous there.

Jack Wrighton 8:13
Yeah a really fascinating. fascinating woman. So you Alexandra initially had a sort of a bumpy start with reading, you know, you were sort of a bit resistant to it. I know, certainly, I had a very similar experience as well and Liz, you have this, you know, this sort of sick bed experience. It sounds like where you know, Anne of Green Gables really caught your attention. Liz was this interest in reading... did it continue on into your teenage years? I know some people interestingly, have a bit of a lull in their teenage years and sort of rediscover it. What was the case for you?

Liz Calder 8:49
Yeah, so I would say I had a bit of a lull. Other things seem to have caught my interest and I did during my school years, I really can't remember doing a lot of actual reading and books. Of course, we, you know, studied books, and but my life was very full of other activities. Certainly, I did read avidly every book about riding ponies that I could come across. Of course, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of them, The Pulling Thompson sisters in particular, but they all seem to. I mean, the whole business of going to New Zealand from my personal point of view, was that I had been promised a pony when we got there. So after, you know, a long voyage and a lot of waiting around to find a final resting place where my parents would be on this farm and then this long-awaited pony came and so I was busy writing as well as reading pony books. But yeah, I mean, my English teachers, those who were inspiring led me into all kinds of reading of the classics, Jane Eyre, and so on. But I would say reading as such took a bit of a backseat really until I was through university, because you have to do so much reading anyway when studying that, actually, you know, you're doing set books and while I really loved doing all of that, and was very interested in reading the fiction of the early 20th century, you know, the Virginia Wolf's etc. Yes, I suppose reading as I know it now. Now, of course, it's different, I do read a great deal. I'm constantly reading new books coming out as well as catching up with old one. But, you know, sometimes life took over and I did a little less reading during those early teenage years.

Jack Wrighton 11:25
Yes. It's something we find certainly in the stores is that, you know, people. It's an ongoing relationship with reading, you know, the classic one is students saying, because they have to read so much for university is saying to us, I can't wait to finish university so I can read, you know, for enjoyment. And you know, you can absolutely enjoy what you're you're reading at university, because it's the moment you have to read it, I feel there can be not always, but an element of the sort of enjoyment can fall away, I suppose. Maybe that's, you're not discovering it for yourself, you've been told to, you know, read this, you know, see what you think. So that's a common one as well. Or, you know, we also have, you know, people saying, sometimes parents as well saying, you know, while the kids are young, or, you know, their main reading is reading, you know, for the child, but then they sort of, you know, rediscover it later on. Well, how about you, Alexandra, what was your teenage years sort of relationship with reading like?

Alexandra Pringle 12:29
It was a completely passionate relationship. It was, it was sort of all I did and two things. One was, my mother was very strict and so she didn't let me go out very much and I was really happy. So I didn't mind that I have two brothers and, you know, family life was very jolly. But also when I was about 11, my father was a school teacher, he was an English teacher, my mother was also a teacher, and a very passionate reader and my father gave me Jane Austen to read when I was 11 and Thomas Hardy, the sort of minor Hardy's like Two on a Tower and The Hand of Ethelbert. I just read my way through the whole lot. Clearly not understanding very much, but I thought, you know, Pride and Prejudice was a great romance and, and then I had sort of re-read them every few years and the other major reason why I read so much is that I was a very, very bad student at school and I never did my work. I would pretend to be doing my homework, but I would have a novel under my desk, and my parents came in and I'd, you know, I'd shove it away. So I basically didn't do my schoolwork and did reading and I think what I was doing was preparing for the rest of my life. I obviously didn't know that then. But it did mean that I failed to get into university because I was such a bad student and I ended up going to a Technical College, Cambridge Tech, and I did a degree there. Well, I did a secretarial course first and then found that you could do degrees and again, I was a pretty lazy student. So I read, when my university is particularly discovering American writers, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and so on, and before that, when I was at school, the exciting writers for me with all the women who were writing at the time, like Margaret Drabble, Nell Dunn, Gail Barker and it was so exciting to me that women were writing about their ordinary lives and that you could write about anything. It was an absolute revelation. So they were the most exciting books that I was reading up until college time.

Jack Wrighton 14:36
Yeah, I think that a particularly wonderful thing about when I speak to anyone, you know, whether that's writers or editors or anyone within the, you know, within the industry is, it doesn't sort of matter what their sort of trajectory was, you know, it's that love of reading that really is the key or the, you know, the love of good storytelling or however you want to say it. That is the kind of the key element there and in terms of being a bad student, I can absolutely empathise with that, because I had an author once to say to me, and I think this sums me up as well. It's they had all the enthusiasm of a well-achieving student, but none of the ability and I think I think that certainly sums up my you know, you are always enthusiastic, but not a particularly good student. But when it came to reading that was, yeah, that was a really important element and so, of course, you know, bringing us through to today, you both have, you know, well-established careers within the publishing industry and what I want to ask now is actually the last book that you read, that really sort of stood out for you or really spoken to you starting at starting with you, Liz, something that you've read recently that you've particularly enjoyed.

Liz Calder 15:54
Yes, well, the last book, I read just very recently, is a book that I actually was given by the author some years ago, probably about 10 years ago. It's by a guy who is probably one of the leading contemporary novelists in Spain. His name is Enrique Vila-Matas and the book is called Bartleby and Co. It's a book that came to me actually from various writers who absolutely love it, and it is entirely a writer's book. It's wickedly funny, dry, droll. The hero is a clerk in Barcelona and he uses the idea of somebody who is a Bartleby, which came up in a short story by Herman Melville. And Bartleby and Co's the title he calls himself a Bartleby and a Bartleby is a writer who does not write and what the Bartleby says when questioned, he says, I prefer not to, okay, so I prefer not to is a kind of lead light mode with goes through the novel and there's a parade of light Bartlebys in literature starting at Rambault, Socrates, Kafka, Je, Wittgenstein, Balzac, Flaubert, all of these writers are what he calls writers of the no. So it's a strange, but he sustains the idea and the joke and it's completely mesmerising. It's very, very funny. Simulating, and, yeah, it's just so humourous, so elegant. It's not a long novel. It's only 160 pages, I think. But honestly, it just takes you into a completely set frame of mind and I met him when he came to the festival that we have in Brazil, and he signed this book for me, and I can't read what he wrote. But he did a lovely portrait of himself. I don't know if you can see it. I only just picked it up and read it for the first time the other day and I'm very glad I did.

Jack Wrighton 18:43
Yes. I love the yes, the hat and the sort of the cloak frame for our listeners who unfortunately can't see this, but yes, and lovely sort of yeah... a trilby, would you say a trilby hat and then this signature is within that. Yeah I think that's lovely.

Liz Calder 19:03
I think he's wearing a cape as well.

Jack Wrighton 19:05
Yes, yeah. It's nice when a signature is, you know, some authors. Yeah, I've seen some lovely, you know, illustrations or you know, that they add something to the signature I think it always makes it a bit special Bartleby and Co. Was that one of those cases then? You said so it was 10 years ago that you were given this book but it's just now that...

Liz Calder 19:27
Yeah, when Villa-Matas came to Brazil and I got the book then just put it on one side and then just picked it up.

Jack Wrighton 19:39
Yes. Yeah. I think that's something any reader can empathise with, is having books for some time. I always say to customers in the shop, you know when they say all but you know, I've already got a to-read pile that is quite tall you know, I say I think sometimes a book sort of tells you when it's time to read it you can have it for some time, but eventually, you know, it will you will look at it and you'll think now's the time to read it. Yes, because of course, you lived in Brazil for a while. Am I correct in saying that Liz?

Liz Calder 20:11
Yes. Yes that's right.

Jack Wrighton 20:13
Yeah. And I believe you set up a literary festival there. Again, is that correct?

Liz Calder 20:19
Yes, that's right. Yes. I lived in Brazil, in the 60s, when I was out there, not working. I had two very young children at the time and my then husband was sent there by his business. So you know, we had four years there and I absolutely loved it. It felt like home, suddenly, I felt more than I have many other places. But the books, but reading and there was very little... of course, my Portuguese wasn't all that great. So I wasn't able to read a lot of Brazilian but we set up the festival in a little fishing village. Well, Alexander's been down there it's a very, very charming fishing village and this year, it will be the 22nd anniversary of it starting and they had a couple of years with no, of course, because of the pandemic. So we're going back in November, for the first live festival again.

Jack Wrighton 21:40
Oh, very exciting. Yes. Yeah. It's been nice to see that's been a common thread over the past year, as you know, in in-person events that you know, haven't been able to happen over the next couple of years starting up again and it puts a nice energy in the air. There's something about you know, doing these things in person that you just can't, you can't emulate over zoom or, you know, yeah, you know, it's a very personal thing. So Alexandra, a recent book, moving over to you that as you know, really spoken to you or you particularly enjoyed or engaged with?

Alexandra Pringle 22:19
Well, it's actually the most recent book, obviously, I read manuscripts all the time. It's quite rare to get to read books, but I did read Meg Rosoft's new book, which is actually published as a YA book. I never really understand what the about those categories and I loved her last novel, The Great Garden and grabbed a proof of this because Bloomsbury published it on the children's side and I think it's only just been published, and I absolutely loved it and it's a novel about friendship. It's called Friends Like These and it's set in New York in the 1980s and these 18-year-old girls who are in terms in a newspaper in New York, obviously a very prestigious newspaper. You think it's probably the New York Times and it's one incredibly meltingly burningly hot summer with these girls sort of on the loose for the first time in their lives and our heroine moves in. She's in a cockroach-infested apartment with very dodgy flatmates, and then one of the other interns comes from a very wealthy background and she moves into her apartment and it turns out that that friend is incredibly manipulative and it's quite a toxic relationships. So it all unfolds over that summer. I love novels that are sort of coming-of-age novels, Bohemian girl's stories. And you know, we all love watching The Devil Wears Prada because it reminds us of our first jobs and mine was working at Virago Press in the 1970s and my boss Carmen Callil was very like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada so I want to remind myself of those days, and I published a wonderful memoir called My Salinger days by Joanna Rakoff, which is about working for a literary agency in New York and dealing with JD Salinger and that was made into a film recently as well. But they're also there's a whole tradition of these kinds of Bohemian girl stories that I've always loved from The Constant Nymph that was published in the 20s, I Capture the Castle, The Dud Avocado and Barbara Trapido's amazing Brother of the More Famous Jack, which we've just reissued as a 40th-anniversary edition, and Meg is in totally in that tradition and she does it wonderfully and she's funny and acute and sharp, and just gets those young women so well.

Jack Wrighton 24:53
It's interesting as you say, with the categorisation of you know, of, you know, something like why I think you know, as we say to people coming into the shop, you know, we have these categories, you know that they can be quite useful for navigating all the wonderful books that come out. But sometimes, you know it's also nice to say to readers, actually, you know, ignore the categories. If it speaks to you, if you read the back, or you know, and you feel this is the story for me, then actually, no label can take that away.

Alexandra Pringle 25:23
No, I mean, for me, Meg Rosoff is as much for a 69-year-old as it is an 18-year-old and I would say that about The Dud Avocado and The Constant Nymph, you know, there's these books are eternal and for every age.

Jack Wrighton 25:39
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Liz Calder 25:43
Yes. I saw that Friends Like These had very good reviews recently as well. I think at the reviews been I thought it sounded absolutely marvellous.

Alexandra Pringle 25:53
Yeah, I'll send you a copy and actually, the one before The Great Garden is set in Suffolk, because she lives in Suffolk and it's about a summer in Suffolk and I love it, love it. It's absolutely wonderful.

Jack Wrighton 26:14
Now, the next question, I personally think is very cruel and if anybody asks me this question, I would struggle with it, because the one that we have is the book that changed your life. Now, I'm sure as both of you have published so many people, you must have read so many manuscripts come across so many books during your time, you know, in the industry, but also just as readers as well, I'm sure that's very tricky. So I think maybe it might be good to sort of narrow that down. Although I know that doesn't narrow it down too much with both of your times at Bloomsbury.

Liz Calder 26:47
Oh, well. Yes, I was going to answer the original question by saying, look, what did literally change my life was The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan because that meant told me that I wasn't going to be filling my life with being a mother of two little ones, and that I could have a bit more of a life of my own and that book really inspired me. When I come to Bloomsbury, it's very hard to choose. There were a lot of books during that time, that meant an enormous amount to me, it was very exciting to set up and start a list from scratch and we had a tremendous sort of group of us starting out, all you know, working together it was it was I think, a few years. But I suppose of, you know, off the top of my head the book comes into it to answer your question is The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. It was partly that it galvanised Bloomsbury. When that book came in, it was on offer. It wasn't a big wide auction. It was offered to four publishers, of which whom Bloomsbury was one, I think Secor was another, Faber was another and Cape was another and we had to give one offer, it wasn't an auction, we just had to make an offer. The whole company, which probably consisted of no more than about 15 people, or 20 people, at that point, read the book, everybody fed into the response. We had a very, I think, imaginative and thoughtful obviously winning promotion campaign that the whole company contributed to, and we were allowed to make one bid and I think most of us made the same bid as far as I've been able to find out. The money wasn't an issue. So it was the campaign, the enthusiasm, the imagination and so we were utterly and completely thrilled when, when Bloomsbury was given that the great pleasure and honour of publishing, Michael Ondaatje's wonderful book, and everything seemed to happen and go right with that book, you know, people loved it, the reviews everywhere, all over the world really, and then the film and you know, went on and on and on for years, and it was a very, very special time and a special book and one that yeah, I won't ever forget.

Jack Wrighton 30:00
And Alexandra, sorry, I realised I've rather cruelly sort of...

Alexandra Pringle 30:05
Changed the goalposts you have yes!

Jack Wrighton 30:08
Sorry, what was your original answer to that question?

Alexandra Pringle 30:11
So my original answer was the book, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and I was when I was a child, my father went to West Africa every summer, he used to work for the West African Examination Syndicate, and he bring back suitcases full of indigo-dyed Batik and jewellery and dolls and things and then one year, he came back with this book, and I think I was 13 or something and he gave it to me to read and I was absolutely transformed and transfixed by it, because it was as if, when I read the book, the whole world shifted on its axis and I remember the incredible scene when a white man rides into this African, this Nigerian village on a bicycle and walks off, and they think it's a horse, and they tether it to the tree and it was that thing of seeing the world in an entirely different way and I think it's informed everything about the way that I publish, really. It's, you know, I think that one of the early writers I took on was Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize last year and reading by the sea took me back to Achebe, you know, publishing his books over 20 years. So Chinua Achebe is like my god, really, from when I was a child. So that was an absolutely transforming book for me.

And, you know, would you mind also as well answering the new question as well, in terms of your relationship with Bloomsbury?

Well, I will try to, it's very, very hard to ask somebody to talk about one of their babies.

Jack Wrighton 31:57
Yes, absolutely!

Alexandra Pringle 31:59
But so what I'll do is I'll talk about a book that I think means so much, to me, profoundly, means a great deal to me. And that's a novel by the Irish writer, Colum McCann. It's his most recent novel called Apeirogon and it's a novel that is about Palestine and Israel and two men who lost their daughters to the conflict and they are real men that he knows, and it's telling their story, but he tells it through history, and music and poetry, it's when he talks about writing it, because you cannot understand how you could write such a novel. It's so complex, and it's soars and it sings and he said, it was like conducting and I thought that was absolutely brilliant. It wasn't like writing it was like conducting and it means a great deal. First of all, because it's a great work of art, I think. But secondly, because I have been twice to Palestine because our author Bloomsbury author, Ahdaf Soueif, who worked with Liz originally, and then with me when when I took over, started the Palestine Literature Festival, and I went on it with her twice, and this festival, you're taken in a bus, a whole lot of writers, and you're taken through checkpoints, and the writers are taken to communities, refugee camps, cultural centres, universities, and you talk and meet people and it's the most extraordinary experience and everyone who's been on it is absolutely transformed. You never don't feel the same way about the world and when I was there, Michael Palin was on it, you know, Richard Ford was on it when I sent my son on it few years later and I published an anthology of pieces from writers who had been on it to celebrate 10 years of the festival. So Palestine has always meant, from that moment of that first visit has meant a great deal to me. So what Colum is writing about with humanity and love and understanding is extraordinary and I gave it to a Jewish novelist who I work with who's a very prominent person, and she read it and she said, I will never walk down the street in Jerusalem and feel the same way or look at it in the same way again, it's completely changed me and I think that this is a novel that will change people, does change people. So it's both beautiful and very important.

Liz Calder 34:33
Yeah, absolutely agree about that. It's a wonderful book

Jack Wrighton 34:36
And a trend I see with, you know, both of your answers, and reading your, your parts in the Bloomsbury 35 book as it is You both seem to have quite an international outlook and that seems like it was, you know, quite important to all and still is to Bloomsbury. Liz, obviously, you've, you know, lived in several different countries and Alexandra I think that it was in your excerpt that you say that, you know, from that, you know, introduction to Things Fall Apart that, you know, there's always been an interest in not just kind of English writing, but the stories that have been told globally, that feels like it's been important to you both.

Alexandra Pringle 35:16
Very important and I'm really proud of the fact that Bloomsbury has, from the very beginning been such an international publisher and has published from really all over the world. You know, it's something that I think you and I did quite naturally, don't you, Liz?

Liz Calder 35:33
Yes, I didn't really stop to think about it, but, but it has been always something that I particularly like books that take you somewhere completely new and different, and you can be immersed in those spaces and I mean, I suppose the one that influenced me, most of that I've had experience of publishing was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, long before Bloomsbury. But that book, you know, that really did open my eyes to India and all the amazing world that he exposes in that book and the other book that I was going to mention about, in answer to the book that everyone should read is, is a book that Bloomsbury did publish called The Ventriloquist Tale, by Pauline Melville, which, again, takes us to British Guyana, you know, an area of South America, not all that much well known outside and again, and you know, so vivid in its description, and she really is hugely talented, if only she would write more. Two or three books of short stories, two novels but The Ventriloquist Tale does the one that I really think could go up there alongside *unintelligible* and the Salman Rushdie's of the world that we can, you know, identify, taking you to inside these places that, you know, you may never go to, but you really can be immersed in the life there and the characters and the people and everything about it and Pauline whose a career started in the theatre and on film. I mean, she did a lot of television and film, she was in so many well-known films, I haven't gotten them in my head, but I think it was her ability, the imaginative ability to enter into the lives of others, as an actor, that then she was able to put into her fiction writing, which, you know, she only began quite late in her life, immensely gifted.

Jack Wrighton 38:35
And it must be you know, to whether just as a reader or more a personal relationship as their editor and, you know, it sounds like you know, these relationships with you know, writers are such an important part of the job one moment that really stood out to me and the Bloomsbury 35, Alexandra, when you talk about learning that Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel that, you know, you have been publishing him for so long that it was like a, you know, a genuine emotional experience, you know, because of over a period of that time, you know, they must be friends really, as well as, you know, writers that you're publishing.

Alexandra Pringle 39:16
Yes, there are relationships that go on over many decades and there's so much more than a business relationship and you feel, you know, deeply committed and, and also incredibly fond of the writers that you work with for that length of time and in the case of Abdulrazak, I was also... I was feeling quite sad, because Afterlives, which is one of his I mean, all his books are marvellous, but Afterlives, I thought was one of his greatest and it wasn't listed for the Booker Prize or any other prize and I was deeply disappointed, and Black Lives Matters had just happened and the chair of the Booker was a very distinguished black woman publisher, and I thought, this is going to be his moment. I really believe that it would happen, you know, and it didn't and then months passed and there was a big article in The Guardian, which was with the headline reinventing the canon of black literature and they were all black writers, Bernadine Evaristo and Ben Okri and so on choosing the, you know, talking about the important lineage of black riding, there was not one mention of Abdulrazak's name and I at that moment, lost it on social media and wrote on Facebook and on Twitter, I can't bear this! And literally four or five days later, he won, the prize was announced. I just burst into floods of tears. When we published After Lives there was only one other edition in the world and that was a Turkish edition. No others. There are now 45 different languages publishing that book and his backlist. You know, I mean, it's just changed everything. Yeah, everything in that moment

Liz Calder 41:09
Amazing. Really do deserve a great deal of congratulations. Because just to stick with it, and also over all that time, or all those books which got such a miserable response.

Alexandra Pringle 41:25
He would always get nice reviews, he would always get good reviews, you know, because he was respected by other writers, but the prizes took no notice of him, you know, kill me. Anyway, it all comes out in the wash.

Jack Wrighton 41:45
It sounds you know, it's a real I can imagine the people outside you know, listening to this, who don't know the industry that maybe they were thinking it was even quite, not emotionless, but you know, that you they give their book in, you know, it gets edited goes out, but the amount of passion that's out there is, certainly for me interviewing people from you know, across the industry, is so palpable.

Alexandra Pringle 42:08
Yes, it's so emotional, and what people don't realise, because people think of your successes, because that's the sort of obvious things, the books that work, but they don't know all the heartbreaks, all the failures, because particularly with fiction, it's so hard to make it work and you could publish a novel, that is absolutely superb and it can sink and, you know, we all do our best, but you can't make them work. You can't actually physically make it work. Do you know what I mean? And so there's a lot of heartaches, as well as joy.

Jack Wrighton 42:45
Yes. And it sounds like as well, you know, with the creating of the Bloomsbury 35 anthology, that, again, a theme from both of your sort of segments is the difficulty in trying to sum up, you know, those 35 years, you know, with a limited list of, you know, writers, when the pool to pick from, must have been, you know, hundreds, if not more of brilliant writers and to, you know, to narrow that list down is a, I must say an unenviable task, I feel. Liz, did you find that your time there, picking a list of writers for the book, that that was tricky?

Liz Calder 43:28
Yes, well, I mean, the book of if I'd had, you know, had my, my ideal circumstance, the book would be, you know, three times the size...

Jack Wrighton 43:44
And a lot more volumes.

Liz Calder 43:45
And possibly, yes, in many volumes. Yes, you can't. It's like, you know, picking and choosing your babies. I mean, that you can't really, it's very difficult to do that and I made the point of, you know, several people that I, I find it impossible to accept that they were not included. They'll find it the same way when they see. It's very, very hard. But obviously, there were constraints of length and so we had to be, you know, fairly rigorous and I suppose, trying to select... what I hope for this, and I don't know if Bloomsbury is prepared for this. But if this book really brings to attention, some books, which haven't been noticed for the last 20 years, you know, they'll be putting in some reprints because one really, that is a trouble, that the life of a novel is is perilously short, really. I mean, there's publication as and then there's a gap, and there's reviews and so on and then there's the paperback, and then there's reviews and then what happens? You know, and that's why, for me, you know, bringing back into focus, at least in a small way and maybe this will help something like The Ventriloquist Tale by Pauline Melville, which, you know, was published quite a long time ago, but should I think, be in print and selling again, that's what I would like to see happen. Bloomsbury we can take that up. They'll be cursing me!

Jack Wrighton 45:54
Yes, yeah and again, we see that, you know, quite often in the shop, you know, books that people have really loved and they come in and they think, oh, actually, I was telling a friend about this great book I read all, you know, years ago, and then you sort of have to be the one to break the news, oh, you know, currently it's out of print, you know, there's secondhand copies out there and, you know, they understandably look dumbfounded because, you know, we're never spoken to you that much and you've thought well, this is a brilliant piece of fiction, you know, for some bookseller to turn around and say, oh, you know, it's not out of print, understandably, that, you know, there's sometimes Oh, well, you know, are you sure? And there's, you know, there's a bit of back and forth to really convince them because, you know, understandably, they think, oh, surely not, you know, it must still be out there.

Alexandra Pringle 46:40
But some sometimes extraordinary things happen, like with Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles it published 10 years ago. And last year, it went to number one in the New York Times bestseller list. You know, and we sold just before Christmas, a million copies.

Jack Wrighton 46:57
Wow!

Alexandra Pringle 46:58
Yeah and that is because children, teenagers, it's school children have discovered it, and they talk about it on TikTok and it's like a virus. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. So that's the amazing moment, you know, is when out of the blue that an extraordinary thing happens to a book that you thought has had its life and you had a very good life, lovely life, it won the Women's Prize. But this thing that's happened in the last two years is, yeah, completely astonishing, isn't it?

Jack Wrighton 47:33
Oh, the power of TikTok is, you know, I think booksellers are tapping into it, you see now things like TikTok tables, you know, in bookshops, books recommended on TikTok. But I think I think there's still a lot to be, I mean, maybe not explored, maybe, as you say, you know, you call it a sort of a virus because it does feel organic. So, you know, it's all well and good, saying, you know, oh, it's worth exploring, but actually, I feel part of its joys is yeah, organic.

Alexandra Pringle 48:03
I agree. I agree. Why can't we just let them get on with it? Find their books and do their thing, you know, and hope for the best.

Jack Wrighton 48:12
And it's a good example of when we were talking about, you know, labels earlier of books of YA, or things like that, you know, what's been really exciting about TikTok is you will have, you know, children coming in, and they're picking books that for us are on, you know, just the general fiction shelf. You know, and I think that's very exciting because that's, you know, one thing we really noticed is, we have someone in the shop, doing a sort of work experience, but I mean, that's the wrong word for it, because she works for World Book Day and, you know, she was saying the one thing that they've noticed in studies, that trumps things like class, even race, is that if children are allowed to select or anyone is allowed to select the book that they want to read, you know, it doesn't matter what category it's from, whether it's too young for them, or too old, that that is what encourages reading, and we'll bring them and, you know, there's potential limitations to that. But I think, you know, that's a great example of, you know, younger people discovering these books for themselves.

Alexandra Pringle 49:17
As we did I mean, you know, surely we, you know, we said, I was reading Jane Austen, when I was 11. These categories are so confining, and, in fact, the book that I had chosen as the book that everyone should read his Kamila Shamsie's new novel, it's not actually going to be published till September. That's called Best of Friends and it begins in Karachi, in the 1980s, with these teenage girls, and their friendship and their relationship and then it goes later to London when they're women in their 40s and they're very distinguished and it's rather like the Meg Rosoff actually, I think I obviously like books about friendships as well. It's, you know, it's about what happens to their friendship and about long friendships, and I think this is a novel that teenagers would love to read, you know, just as they love to read the Song of Achilles. You know, it's it's a book that reveals so much to them and it's so good about teenage life and what these girls are like together and Kamila set out to write it because she was so interested in how friendships that you have from when you're very little are different from friendships you have as an adult, because those friendships you choose, and you don't choose the ones from when you're very, very small, but the bonds can be incredibly deep and strong and she explores that so well. So I know that that's a book that teenage girls would like. But my relationship with Kamila is also an extraordinary friendship, because when I met her, she was 21 and she was a student in a university in upstate New York and I was doing a creative writing workshop and there was just one good story and these terrible pile of stories about a little boy flying a kite in Pakistan and I just heaped praise and talked about that story and this very shy girl came up to me afterwards who'd written it and said, I think you published my great aunt and this was Kamila and I had published her great art who was a very important Indian writer called Attia Hosain, who only ever wrote two books, a novel and some stories, but both Vikram Satan and Salman Rushdie have said that she was the mother of the Indian novel written in English and I'd republished them at Virago with introductions by Anita Desai. So I was an agent at the time, and I gave Kamila my card and said, I think there's a longer narrative behind this story and if you'd like to explore that, keep in touch with me. So we worked for 18 months on it, and then I sold it to Granter books and then she came with me to Bloomsbury. So we've been together since then.

Jack Wrighton 51:51
Yes. Again, these you know, these look, yeah, these long-standing relationships. I feel, unfortunately, I could keep talking about books forever, but that has brought us to the end of our time. I want to thank you both so much for joining us here at Mostly Books Meets and yes, I must say for our listeners out there, the Bloomsbury 35 anthology is out now. It came out in May, it will be available from all good bookshops, including most of the books. Alexandra, Liz, thank you so much for joining us at Mostly Books Meets.

Alexandra Pringle 52:26
Thank you

Liz Calder 52:27
Thank you, a pleasure.

Sarah Dennis 52:31
All of the books mentioned during the podcast are available to buy for the Mostly Books website. This podcast has been presented and produced by members of the team at Mostly Books in Abington. If you enjoyed what you heard, please rate, review and subscribe because apparently helps people find us.

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