The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Anne-Solange Noble has been International Rights Manager at Gallimard since 1992. She was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and graduated from McGill University in Hispanic Literature. After spending two years in Mexico she went to Paris where she studied International Relations at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. In 1985 she landed a job in rights negotiations with Flammarion. Seven years later she moved to Gallimard to do the same thing, and has been there ever since.  Recently her focus has been on licensing English-language rights for Gallimard fiction and non-fiction to American and British publishers. We met at her offices in the Rive Gauche district of Paris to talk about her role, and the obstacles she's faced selling into these English markets over the past three decades. 

Lifted from Bill Samuel's website: Itinerant one-time chartered accountant who has lived in Denmark, East Africa, the Gulf (Arabian/Persian, not Texan) and the Caribbean with shorter stints in Eastern Europe and various rather nice small islands. Born in England into a family with an international outlook, an interest in people and a feeling for the cultural side of life. William Foyle, one of the greatest booksellers, and book collectors, of the twentieth century was his grandfather.     Bill inherited a passion for books and​ his life ​has largely been ​shaped by those ​he read as a child, which gave ​him a desire to see as much of this wonderful world of ours as​ he could​.   ​As for what he's done: ​more or less chronologically: auditing in London and Copenhagen, tourism stuff in Kenya, house building in Portugal, financial consultancy in the UK and the Gulf, Executive Director of an investment bank in Bahrain, Director of Tourism and Superintendent of Offshore Finance in the Turks and Caicos Islands, commercial advisor to the government of St. Helena and Vice Chairman of ​his family business, Foyles bookshop​, which he wrote about in An Accidental Bookseller,  A Personal Memoir of Foyles, and which we talk about in this episode of The Biblio File podcast​.  We met in the garden of a villa near the town of Condom, in southern France. The weather was perfect.

John Freeman is an American writer and a literary critic. He was the editor of Granta from 2009 to 2013, and is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His writing has appeared in more than 200 English-language publications around the world and he currently edits a series of anthologies of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Freeman's, published in partnership with Grove/Atlantic and The New School. Reason enough, I figured, to want to talk to him about the role of the editor.    His second book, a collection of his interviews with major contemporary writers titled How to Read a Novelist, was published in the U.S. in 2013 by FSG and features profiles of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Geoff Dyer, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and others. It's the reason I wanted to talk to him about interviewing authors (plus the fact that I've watched him skillfully question authors on stage - well on Youtube - many times).   During his time with the National Book Critics Circle, John launched a campaign to raise awareness of the cutbacks in book coverage by the U.S. national print media and to save book review sections. We talk about how this effort resulted in the establishment of Literary Hub.

Kenneth White is the founder of Sutherland House Books. He is the former editor-in-chief of Saturday Night Magazine, the founding editor of The National Post, and the former editor and publisher of Maclean’s magazine. He was president of Rogers Publishing, Canada’s largest magazine company, and the founding president of Next Issue Canada (now Texture), in partnership with Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, and Time Inc. Mr. Whyte is the author of The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst (2008, Random House), In 2017, he published Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Knopf), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Last month he launched a suicidal assault on libraries in a 3500-word article in The Globe and Mail newspaper. In it he posits, among other things, that: there are three times as many books borrowed as bought in the United States every year, and four times as many in Canada; that libraries don't passively lend books, they compete with booksellers by advertising how much people can save by borrowing rather than buying books, and they compete among themselves to lend the most books possible; and that most public library lending is of books read for entertainment, not edification, by people who can afford to pay for books.  We talked about his article via Zoom. 

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir exploring her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. It was adapted into a children’s book in 2016. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Artistic Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child, is coming out in January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada.  Jael's recent tweet about Canadian children's book publishers being racist caught my attention, and we agreed to talk about it via Zoom. During the second half of our conversation I present some of the feedback I received from Canadian publishers about the Tweet. During the first Jael talks about her memoir, life with her father, being black in Canada and the feeling of being lost.  Among her key points: diversified hiring practices are good for business, it's important for young black students to meet black authors, and  publishers should pay attention to who's making the money off the stories they choose to publish. (Please accept my apologies for the annoying keyboard tapping sounds that occur at times during the course of the conversation. No idea why they're there. Perhaps it's the Russians trying to wreak havoc with the show, who knows).

Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco and has published several novels. He has written biographies of, among others, the legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; Hergé, the creator of The Adventures of Tintin; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the art dealer, and Georges Simenon, the detective novelist and creator of Inspector Maigret.  As a journalist, Assouline has worked for some of France's leading publications, including Lire and Le Nouvel Observateur. He also publishes a popular blog, “La république des livres.”   A number of his biographies have been translated into English including the one we talk about here, Gaston Gallimard, A Half Century of French Publishing (Harcourt Brace, 1988).

After graduating from university in 2005 Maylis Besserie began  teaching documentary production at the Institute of Communications and Media in Paris, and joined France Culture as a radio producer and host. In February 2020 she published her first novel, Le Tiers Temps (Gallimard). It evokes the last days of Samuel Beckett in a Parisian retirement home. The protagonist, while describing his responses to daily life in the home, also experiences a dream-like reality as he tries to recall the people and places that marked his life. On May 11, 2020 it won the Goncourt Prize for first novel. We met at what we thought would be a quiet cafe in Paris to talk about the journey Maylis has been on with her new novel.  This is the second time I've interviewed her. First time round, several years ago, we met to discuss the art of the author interview.

'Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of the  Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer. The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment.' Under Rosset  Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, publishing, among others, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. Most importantly, in 1954, Grove started publishing Samuel Beckett John Oakes is the co-founder and 50% owner of OR Books, and  publisher of the Evergreen Review, an online revival of the venerable counter-cultural literary magazine originally published by Grove Press under Barney Rosset whose memoir Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship OR Books published in 2017.  I talked with John about Rosset via Zoom.   

Jacques Shore is a partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office, a member of the firm's Advocacy Group, and past leader of the firm's Government Affairs Group.​ He has acted as lead negotiator on many business and government-related initiatives and has worked actively on behalf of the federal government of Canada and provincial governments on a broad range of legal and public policy matters​, including cultural policy.    Actively involved in the community, Jacques is a past chair of Carleton University's board of governors and its executive committee and served as a board governor for thirteen years​. In addition he served as chair of the Distinguished Council of Advisors of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. Jacques ​is ​currently​ ​the Chair of the Library Archives Canada (LAC) Foundation (April 2019 to present).​ ​He is ​also ​counsel to Amazon, providing legal, government relations, and strategic advice to the compan​y, something I stupidly failed to ask him about.    I​ did however hit him with quite a few questions about ​the ​need, ​purpose,​ mission, and plans of the new Library and Archives Canada Foundation and the people involved.

Richard Nash is a coach, strategist, and serial entrepreneur. He led partnerships and content at the culture discovery start-up Small Demons and the new media app Byliner. Previously he ran independent publishers Soft Skull (not Skill) Press and Red Lemonade where he published Maggie Nelson, Lynne Tillman, Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen, Alain Mabanckou, and many others, for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. In 2010 the Utne Reader named him one of 50 Visionaries Changing Your World and in 2013 the Frankfurt Book Fair picked him as one of the Five Most Inspiring People in Digital Publishing. In 2017 he founded Cursor Marketing Services, a shared US publishing office for the world’s leading English-language independent publishers. As a coach, building on decades of mentorship and consulting, he now works directly with artists, writers, and entrepreneurs, helping them navigate personal and professional transitions. We met via Zoom to talk about his influential article 'What is the Business of Literature?' (My cat Boo Bou insisted on voicing her concerns during the first several minutes of the conversation. Apologies for the distraction).