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FEATURE PUBLISHING’S EXODUS


21.10.16 www.thebookseller.com


Commuters leave


London to head north from the capital’s King’s Cross Station


The centre cannot hold


And Other Stories boss Stefan Tobler is taking his business north, and spurred on by pace-setters in the US, Germany and even France, he argues that publishers across the globe can thrive outside a country’s main publishing hub


artists thrive where the cost of living is low. Hence the flood of US writers, musicians and artists to Paris in the 1920s, or the world’s artistic adventurers who landed in Prague in the ‘90s. Many young, expat creatives are now based in Berlin. But almost any metropolis you care to name is becoming expensive to live in and to rent an office in. London is crazy money these days. So perhaps it’s no surprise that in England a lot of innovative literature is coming from publishers based outside of the capital—and more are moving out. At And Other Stories, we publish


F contemporary writing, including many


or publishers to take large risks in publishing, it helps to have low overheads; similarly, writers and


translations. Our authors include many Latin Americans (such as César Aira, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Yuri Herrera), British writers such as Man Booker-shortlisted Deborah Levy and rising star Joanna Walsh (Vertigo), Independent Foreign Fiction Prize-shortlisted Equatorial Guinean Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, and so on. We are international in our choice of writers and in our publishing: we tend to publish simultaneously in the UK and in North America (with the help of our Minneapolis-based distributor Consortium). We favour the innovative writers that surprise readers. In commercial terms, that involves a considerable amount of risk. That’s one reason we are moving away from London’s orbit, and why we see similar


presses doing likewise. And Other Stories has been based mainly in High Wycombe, just west of London, since its formation around 2011 simply for the publisher’s reasons, i.e. my family. But we’re moving to Sheffield, in the north of England, an urban area of around 650,000 people that’s close to other major cities such as Leeds and Manchester.


NORTHERN POWERHOUSE We are not the only risk-taking press heading up north: Asian literature- in-translation specialist Tilted Axis (founded by Man Booker International- winning translator Deborah Smith) is moving from London to Sheffield, and Saraband (its His Bloody Project by


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