“A list that reflects the world”: An Interview with Peter Blackstock

Peter Blackstock has made a reputation for being the only one to say yes. He acquired Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer after 13 other publishers rejected it. The novel went on to win the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Blackstock was also thanked by name in Douglas Stuart's acceptance speech for the 2020 Booker Prize, with the Scottish author praising Grove Atlantic for being the only publisher willing to take a risk on Shuggie Bain.1 Blackstock had already acquired the previous year's Booker winner, Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, completing a remarkable trio of awards within the editor's short career.

Blackstock's editorial work has helped reimagine the contours of contemporary fiction and has contributed to the increasingly global sensibility of US literature in recent years. The list of novels he has acquired and edited is a varied one, featuring debut novels like Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater alongside recent work by Eileen Myles and Abraham Verghese. He has also acquired notable novels in translation, with Sayaka Murata, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, and Yan Lianke among the authors he has helped introduce to US readers. Since joining Grove as an Editorial Assistant in 2011, he has risen to the position of Deputy Publisher. In 2020, he also became the Publisher for Grove Press UK, an imprint operated by Atlantic Books in London, publishing a range of books directly into the UK market. Grove Atlantic is a mid-size independent publisher created through the merger of Grove Press and Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993. The house is conscious of its prestigious heritage — its website presents a timeline titled "A Century of Publishing Excellence" — and the formal experimentation and global orientation of some of its most celebrated books clearly informs its editorial direction.2

Blackstock's transatlantic publishing activities and his cosmopolitan list of authors is, as he explained in our interview, also partly a result of his own mixed heritage. A multilingual English publisher with Punjabi Malaysian ancestry working in New York, his identity is consciously multifarious (during the course of our conversations, indeed, he is in the process of obtaining an Irish passport by virtue of his grandfather). He has worked in both UK and US publishing, giving him a perspective on the American publishing industry that is simultaneously that of an insider and informed by global connections.

In our interview, we discussed his background in the industry and his editorial process, touching on the mechanics of editorial collaboration as well as the differences in editing translations. Blackstock also expanded on the qualities he seeks in fiction and the ways in which the various aspects of his identity contribute to his editorial sensibility, and to his desire to create "a list that reflects the world."

The interview took place over Zoom and email throughout 2022 and 2023, and has been edited for clarity and length.

TG: What made you want to become an editor? Given that it's such a behind-the-scenes job, was there a point at which you remember becoming aware of this as a profession that you might be interested in, or of particular editors that you admired?

PB: I knew about the job because my aunt worked in publishing: her name was Jane Blackstock, and she did a variety of roles. For a while she was working at the indie house Victor Gollancz, and then she worked in a series of independent publishers as they were sold to the larger conglomerates. She had a career mostly selling rights, working on the translation rights side of the business. I remember she would come home for the Christmas holidays with typed-out manuscripts, and I would see her reading these many printed pages, and we would talk about it.

I studied German and Russian at university and thought about doing an interpreting or translation course but I knew that publishing was an option because of my aunt, who actually had died by the time I graduated. I started working in London as an assistant to a literary scout, which is a weird part of the business; you're basically paid on retainer by foreign publishers, and often a film company. We were mostly focusing on what the literary agents were going out with to editors and how London editors were reacting. The market for translation rights in Germany is so competitive and they're looking for the next big literary book and the next big thriller, the big commercial women's saga, or whatever.

That was an interesting job because you read everything from the most commercial books to the most literary. I found I was pretty bad at the commercial side of things: I would say things like, "Oh, this book just seems really ridiculous," and then it would become not just a good bestseller, but the number one bestseller for weeks. I was in that job for a year, and then I was trying to move to New York — because my husband's American, we met at university in England — and started as the editorial assistant to the publisher at Grove, Morgan Entrekin. And I loved the idea of moving into editorial from rights and scouting, because you're really working in a team in a different way than a scout or an agent selling a book: you're seeing it at all stages of the process.

TG: One of the most notable things about your list is how global and outward-facing it is, which must partly come from that familiarity with different literary genres and markets.

PB: Definitely. Part of the reason why I got my job at Grove is that I have several foreign languages. My boss [Entrekin] liked the fact that I can read books in French, German, and Russian. It is really part of the history of Grove that we've found success publishing books in translation. There's the great backlist of writers that we're still publishing, and often we've found these titles that other American houses have overlooked because they're not written in English, so that is something I'm encouraged to do. I think having a background that's varied and that's interested in other parts of the world is hugely helpful in working in literary publishing.

TG: Do you think that interest in writing from around the world, and particularly literature in translation, reflects changes in literary publishing more generally? The needle seems to have shifted over the past decade or so, with the rise of the indies and a higher percentage of translated fiction being published in the U.S.

PB: Definitely. And I think it's more competitive for us as editors recently. For instance, there was a wonderful book by Vanessa Springora, Le Consentement [later published in English as Consent], which was a huge success for Grasset in France. They were selling the translation rights and I think there were two other offers, and the highest bid was HarperVia, which is a big translation-focused imprint at HarperCollins. So the big houses are setting up imprints devoted to translation too, and it can be a little tougher for us. I think there's definitely been a change. I don't know if it's Stieg Larsson plus Ferrante plus Knausgård, but there's now this feeling that you can actually make money publishing books in translation, if you find the right things. There have always been big blockbuster international books, but I think it used to be tougher to get those books reviewed and tougher to get booksellers interested in them. It's a little bit easier now.

TG: What is your process like in terms of acquiring books from outside the U.S.? With a book like Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's Animalia, for example, would scouts tell you about that?

PB: It's mostly through when you meet editors or agents at book fairs or they come on visits to New York and tell you about books. I've gone on publishing trips to Paris, for example, and Russia. So it's relatively reactive, which works, I think, because the foreign rights managers know what's more likely to work in translation or to work for the American market, and so they're kind of self-selecting.

It's funny, I remember going to a meeting at Éditions du Seuil in Paris and the rights director there told me about three books, and I'd been on this trip hearing about French books the entire week. I thought the first book sounded quite interesting, the second book perhaps not quite as interesting, and then the third book she was like, "it's this autofictional book about this young guy who grown up in Northern France and he's very poor, it's a really tough environment, and he's gay." And I said something like "this just seems too difficult for us, I'm not sure I really need to read that one." But she sent it to me, and it was Edouard Louis's En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule [The End of Eddy], and I read the whole thing and said, "This is amazing," and tried to acquire the rights. So if you read something and it captures you, you can get past your preconceptions of how difficult it might be.

Animalia, for instance, I bought on a full English translation which Fitzcarraldo had already commissioned. I bought this wonderful Estonian book by a writer called Andrus Kivirähk that was already translated and successful in French from a small publisher; sometimes there's that possibility of reading something through a gateway language. And we recently published a really exciting Russian book, Kira Yarmysh's The Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number 3, that I read in Russian and was excited about when I heard the pitch. I do think that the fact that I could read that in Russian and talk to the author to really explain what I thought about the book and how we're going to work together on the translation was definitely key to being able to acquire it. So it's a mixture of different things.

It's very intuitive, and I think you have that first conception of "is this a book that's going to interest me?" Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. Then the market decides whether we end up being the right fit for the book or does it sell to HarperCollins for a lot more money? So it's an interesting process, and not a perfect one.

TG: Douglas Stuart has said that before you took on his novel, he received several rejections with people telling him, essentially, "this is an amazing book, but I just don't think I can publish it." What bridges the gap between your personal reaction to the book and the sense that there is a market for it?

PB: It's a difficult question to answer. I'll steal a line from Morgan Entrekin, who often says that there's lots of reasons to publish a book and making money is one of them, but it's not the only one. There are writers we work with who we think are fantastic —who we kind of know we're going to lose money by publishing —and yet we continue to publish them happily. So it's not as if every single book needs to carry its own weight. The house as a whole obviously has to stay above water because we've got 30 people on staff and so people's livelihoods depend on the house continuing to be there, but each individual book doesn't need to be profitable. I think at the bigger houses they probably understand that in exactly the same way, but I think the conversation around each individual book is that it should be profitable.

Some of that can make books like Shuggie Bain a challenge, because if you try to put that lens onto it, you're going to talk yourself out of it or your bosses are going to talk you out of it. You as the editor might love it, but others might say, "oh, it's just too small." But we don't think like that. Obviously, we have to have an understanding of our sales expectations of a book, but that's not a reason to put ourselves off if we really want to work with a writer.

With Shuggie, it was just the quality of the writing. I just had total faith that people were going to come to it. It was a book that was likely to sell more copies in the UK than the US. It's really an important contribution to Scottish writing and to this part of British history, and the kind of book that could win a major award. I just fell in love with it, really, and I think because of where I work, my colleagues said yes. And I think the reaction from other people's colleagues was probably much more muted or, you know, even worse.

But it's also subjective too. I know people who I think have amazing taste who didn't love that book when they had it on submission, and vice versa. I've turned down books that have won the Booker Prize, like Milkman! I had that on submission and didn't get very far. I found it a bit confusing and it was probably the wrong day... and then they had this offer from another house and I thought, oh, that's great, that's nice for Anna Burns, and then she wins the Booker Prize. So you have to trust your own taste, and you're not going to publish every single book that's going to be successful. You're always going to have things that you've missed.

TG: You mentioned Fitzcarraldo, and obviously the development of presses like theirs is one of the big developments in Anglophone publishing in recent years. It seems as if there are more small presses and, from an economic point of view, more developed niche markets that enable the publication of particular kinds of ambitious writing.

PB: Well, on the small press ecosystem side, I think you're totally right. I think there's definitely been a boom of interesting smaller presses, particularly focused on works from around the world and things that have been overlooked. In the States, there's Deep Vellum, New Vessel, Europa Editions, Transit Books, World Editions (they're Dutch-based, but they publish quite a lot in English in the UK and the US). Most of those have all come up in the past ten years since I've been living in the States.3 So even just in the last decade, there have been lots of new presses starting up and surviving. Fitzcarraldo has been able to really find amazing books and have huge success publishing real high literature and showing that people can come to it.

It's been great to see that. I think it's easier in some ways in the US than it is anywhere else, because we have this large market of 230-odd million people. Very often you've got North American rights, so you distribute books in Canada too. I once talked to an editor from Slovakia and I asked, "How many books do you work on a year?" And she said, "oh, about 40 or 50." I work on maybe 10 to 12, and I thought gosh, how do you possibly do 40 or 50? Of course, there are a lot of translations included in that figure — there are perhaps not so many original writers that my Slovak colleague is editing — but there's the economic imperative that for those 300, 500, 700 copies sold of each book, you have to justify your own salary and your place in the house and you're going to have to do much more work.

We're lucky in the States because we can publish a book like Animalia and sell, let's say, 5,000 copies in all formats. We operate in a really strong economic market so although in some ways the US is a very commercially-oriented environment, because of the size of the market it's able to sustain niche things in a way that isn't going to be the case in Slovakia.

I did want to ask you about the difference between the UK and the US, since you've moved between the two. It's sometimes said that US editors edit more, and that there's more of an editorial culture on that side of the Atlantic. Is this something you've experienced?

PB: I do think that there's an American editing tradition that is slightly different from the British one. I think American publishers tend to take a little bit longer to schedule their books and publish them, whereas in the UK the turnaround times can be faster. That's partly because the printing times are faster and it's a smaller country, so the distribution is not an issue. It takes us about six weeks to fully distribute a book after we print it, which I know isn't such a problem for British publishers. It's a bit hard to make general comments on, but I think there's some truth to it.

TG: In speaking to editors, it appears that they don't tend to know how other editors work a lot of the time. There seems to be a certain black box element to it.

PB: Yeah, it's such an apprenticeship kind of job and you learn it from your boss, who probably learned it from their boss, and they do it in a particular way for whatever reasons they do it. There are no training courses, and we don't really talk about it with peers. Occasionally I'd talk to my colleagues, especially when I was starting, and I would show them my edit or show them my editorial letters and say, "What do you think?" But we don't really tend to know how our other editorial colleagues work. We're given a lot of autonomy, at least where I work and you just do it in the way that works for you. Unless the author complains, you're fine!

TG: What does work for you? Could you describe your typical process?

PB: When I'm reading for acquisition I'm already starting to think about these things and taking notes as I'm reading, even before I have any idea whether I'm going to publish the book or not. And before I acquire the book, I talk to the author if they're working in English and that gives you a chance to ask questions and try to get a sense of their reaction to some of the bigger thoughts that you might have, because I think you have to be on the same page as the author in order to work together.

So I think it's important that you air your initial thoughts about the book. Sometimes by that point of talking to the author I may have even read the book twice before I have a conversation, and so by that point you've got your initial thoughts together. When it comes to editing, I make comments in the document and change things in the text of the document, which are often typos or something very small and I often change repetitions of words directly in the text rather than suggesting them as a comment. I always say to my authors at every stage of the process, "these are just suggestions and if you feel like it should be the way that you wrote it, you should absolutely change it back."

Often there's this generative process. Perhaps they understand the need to avoid repetition, let's say, but they don't like the words that I'm suggesting, so they choose something different. In larger structural edits, too, that can be the same: it's the thesis-antithesis-synthesis kind of process. I think that's very generative, and I've often found that sometimes a strange idea that I suggest can get incorporated into a book and the author says "Yeah, that really does make sense," or something similar to it makes sense. I end up with this document that's... I mean, I did one recently for a writer and there were over 1500 comment bubbles in this Word document, which is kind of insane! It's a long book, admittedly, but there was a lot to react to and ask about, and that doesn't include the changes on a line level, probably many on every page. I try not to make it overwhelming, and I also try to couch it all by talking to the author again before I send the editorial letter and try to go through it.

I always say to my authors that some of these edits are going to make them say, "What the hell is he thinking? Why is he suggesting that?" But that's part of the process. Then you send on an editorial letter and the marked-up word document and try to work out a schedule. Often there's another round of edits, which tend to be a lot less significant but, for instance, if they've written a new scene, you have to edit that scene, and you have to read it carefully and think about it.

TG: That must be a diplomatic process as much as an editing process, at times. Do authors sometimes have a problem with this process, and are there differences between debut authors and more established writers?

PB: With debut authors, I think there are two things. One is that you have to have that feeling of being on the same page when you're acquiring the book, so they're not shocked or destabilized by your suggestions. I often end up finding myself saying to debut authors, "I love this book, I would publish it the way that it is — but I think that if we go through this process over the next few months, it'll be a better book for you, for me, and for a general reader."

I sometimes talk about distilling the book. When you're cutting scenes and making a book shorter, there's this idea that you're leaving things out or removing things, but you're really trying to boil it down to something that's more intense and more interesting. And I think, as authors go through the process, they tend to really value the fact that someone's spent the time to think about their book and talk about this imaginary world that they've created. It's a great thing to be able to do, but you have to be sensitive. I always say that ultimately it's going to be their book.

In some ways it's not the toughest part of my job; it's the best part of the job in lots of ways. It just requires taking yourself out of everything else that you're doing; it requires a lot of concentration, and sometimes you need a bit of a run up to do it. It's an incredible act of generation that someone's created this thing, and you have to give that the respect it deserves.

TG: In terms of the process, I'm curious about books that are being published in different places at the same time. Is it the case that the author might be working with a different editor in the UK, and if so, how do these different edits get synthesized?

PB: It's a process that we always go through together. Very occasionally you might have a Canadian partner too, or an Australian partner, so there might even be three or potentially four editors. But you don't want to overwhelm the author with four sets of notes, or even two sets of notes, so you want to create one synthesized edit.

Usually when I'm working with a UK editor, someone takes the lead. Very often one person has worked with the author first, or one place is the major market; say, if the author's better known in the UK. So in the case of Douglas Stuart, I'm the editor — I've really done the editing for Young Mungo as well as for Shuggie. That works really well for some books — other times, someone might have a bit more time to start with, so they do a first round and then maybe a few weeks later they send you their ideas and you overlay your notes. I think it can be helpful for an author to see two different sets of ideas, even if they kind of contradict each other but you don't want it to be so contradictory that it's unhelpful. So you have to be aligned in terms of the bigger stuff.

TG: Would those kinds of editorial notes tend to be written with a US audience in mind? For example — again, thinking of Douglas Stuart — references that a US reader might need explained.

PB: Rarely enough. We sometimes do that with the copy edit. For instance, for Young Mungo, we made sure to get a Scottish copy editor because you really want to make sure that it reads absolutely correctly for the period and the language. So the US audience weren't the primary people we were thinking of, even though we originated the book and were organizing the copy edits.

TG: Can I bring you back slightly earlier in the process to try to figure out how different people feed into this? For example, it's been claimed that agents do a lot more editing these days than they might have a few decades ago. Do you get a sense of whether that's accurate or not?

PB: I think that's probably true. I think agents these days do a lot of work to frame a book — which I think they've always done, in terms of saying "this book is X meets Y" — but now also at the level of, "This is why this book is important. This is why we think people are going to pay attention." And they often send out submissions these days with blurbs from other writers —which historically would have been very rare — so sometimes you may even get a submission with four blurbs already. In terms of the editing, I do think that agents work sometimes for years on projects with their authors before they submit them, and that's a long editing process.

It's hard, because I think there's always this understanding that authors don't want to finish the editing process with their agent, they want to finish it with their editor. So there's only so much that they want to do with an agent. But yes, I think it's partly because it can be tough to get people to say yes when manuscripts get circulated at publishing houses — that's kind of the Shuggie Bain scenario. Maybe the editor loves it, but they give it to the marketing director or the publicity director or the sales person and they say, "Oh, it's too difficult." And, for instance, if you need to say to those people, "Oh, well, I think we need to edit the first part, but page 50 onwards is great," that's a difficult thing to get people to understand. So if something is readier to go, and if you can say, "we've got these four great blurbs already," I think people feel that it's already in a more finished form and are more likely to say "yes, let's be in this auction."

TG: The idea of a manuscript coming with blurbs is interesting. That would seem to tilt the balance in favor of writers who have done a particular MFA, or who have particular connections they can draw on to obtain those blurbs.

PB: Yeah, I think that's true. It's definitely not the reason that someone would acquire a book, but it adds to the feeling of completeness and of momentum that is there in a submission from an agent. It depends on your agent, too. There are some agents who would be more likely to do that than others. Most submissions don't come in with any kind of endorsement, but increasingly, it's not rare to see any words of praise in a submission letter — often, as you say, from someone that the writer knows who's maybe a mentor or someone knew they were in a program with, or sometimes from another client at the agency who has had an early version to read.

TG: What does the editorial process look like when there's a translator involved?

PB: Really it's working on the text of the translation, which I think of as more of a line edit as opposed to a structural edit. Occasionally within a line edit — or perhaps if there's a part that's a tiny bit repetitive, or something that doesn't resonate in English — you can say, "is it okay if we cut this paragraph?" But it would generally be cutting a line or two, and not adding anything.

Something I've done in my translations, too, is to de-anglicize things — to use an original language word rather than using an English language word —which is kind of an odd thing to to do as an editor, I suppose (at least in terms of what you were saying about thinking about the US readership), but sometimes texts can feel over-translated. This happened for Convenience Store Woman once or twice, I think, and also for Love in the Big City, Sang Young Park's novel.4 It can feel like an idiom has been translated into something that just sounds so vernacular that it feels weird to encounter. It's hard to balance what's deliberate and what's just, you know, inherently French about this book — and can you bring that over or not? It's a real balancing act. I think the editor's a helpful person in that process because they can say, "This feels over-balanced."

Sometimes you might change paragraph breaks a little, but not often. You're really just looking at the text as a finished version and trying to polish it and ask questions. Sometimes with translations, there are these slightly nonsensical sentences because the syntax has maybe stayed too close to the original or the translator missed a word or misinterpreted the sentence, which can happen. Sometimes if you just shine a light on that, they might say "Oh, this is what I mean."

Sometimes there can be things with consistency —character names, etc. — but nothing bigger than that usually. It's possible, though there's a sense that there isn't the same editing tradition in some other parts of the world and that it's quite an American and UK process to work on the texts and change them a lot. But I've never worked on a translation that I've substantially edited in that way in the process of publishing in English.

TG: Jonathan Galassi has described the editor as being a little like a double agent, with a foot in each camp: you have to think about the market, but you're also beholden to the author and their artistic vision. The job seems to fundamentally incorporate that kind of tension.

PB: I agree. You have to be diplomatic with the author but also enthusiastic with your colleagues. The main thing is that everyone needs to have the same kind of expectations. Which is tough, because if I were to write a book, I would really want everyone to read it and I would want it to be really successful and win a big prize. But obviously that can't happen for every single book.

Also, there's this traditional relationship that publishers have, that you keep working with a writer over several books. We often say this to first time authors: "it's not all about this first book that we're publishing — we're going to keep publishing you, and you'll have a long career." Name your favorite writer —like Hilary Mantel, or Richard Ford, or Toni Morrison, or almost anyone — these are not authors that succeeded with their debut and created an incredible splash. These are people who really developed an audience and were recognized and won an award with their fourth or fifth book. There's a lot of focus in the industry on debuts, and a lot of money and a lot of energy spent on them, but traditionally the publishing industry has been about sticking with writers, and that's something that we still very much do at Grove. They do it at the big houses, too, but I think there's more pressure to have that success sooner, or if not, to move on.

TG: The balance between that traditional role and all of the changes brought about by conglomeration is interesting. It's easy to forget, as you said, that not every book is expected to make money, and that the effects of these processes are not uniform on every publishing house.

PB: We're kind of unique —at least in terms of houses our size or larger —in that we don't do these P&Ls (Profit and Loss analyses) for acquisition. They project how many hardcovers they're going to print and ship and sell through, and then the same for the paperback, and the same for the e-book, and what the audio edition will sell and any other income. Then they project that against the costs of all those sales, plus the marketing cost, and they come up with a number that makes sense for them to offer for the book to still be profitable.

But obviously that's kind of like looking into a crystal ball. I mean, there are ways in which you have a sense of it, but my guess is that these kinds of analyses are not accurate. And the weird thing is that you make your money — or at least for a house like ours, your significant windfalls — from books that vastly overperform against your expectations, again, like Shuggie Bain. Obviously I always felt that book could win a big prize — it's an amazing book, and there's always that possibility — but you can't expect that. And if you were to do your P&L on the basis of it winning the Booker Prize, that would have been accurate in the end, but it would not have been realistic. So it's an odd dance that people do.

And obviously what happens is that these houses get into an auction and they say, "Well, instead of selling 20,000 hardcovers, what if we sell 25,000 hardcovers? What if we sold 30,000 hardcovers? Then we could offer $300,000 for this book, because we really want it." So it's this strange tussle between the market and the numbers side and what the spreadsheet tells you, and your internal drive to compete with editors around town and publish the book. We do something similar too at Grove, in our own way: what do we think we would be likely to ship with this book, and what's our expectation? We're just a little more realistic, I think, or our numbers resemble each other, whereas the numbers of the big houses can be vastly disparate. Sometimes those books do make back the million-dollar advances. It happens, and it totally makes sense to take this big bet sometimes.

TG: You've mentioned prizes a few times, and I wanted to ask you about what kind of role literary prizes play in the life of an editor. They're obviously out there as a possibility, as you said, with the potential to completely change the fortune of a book. How much do you find yourself needing to think about them, and to what extent do they come up in conversations with agents or with authors?

PB: I think I'm quite superstitious in this one part of my life — I really think that somehow if you start to expect those things, they don't happen. So I never think, this book is going to win the Pulitzer Prize, or whatever. But if you publish really interesting books that are doing something different, that are well-crafted and thoughtful and you've worked hard on them in the editing and publishing, then you leave yourself open for those kinds of opportunities.

I've had a really unusual and super-lucky literary career with prizes. The Sympathizer was a book I acquired when I was 26 years old, and that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That has definitely catapulted my career as much as it's catapulted Viet's. We've now sold 800,000 copies of that book in our editions in North America, which is incredible. It's also brought him to this level of prominence. For example, he wrote an op-ed on Thanksgiving for Time magazine, and he's written op-eds for The New York Times. That's partly because of his writing ability and his own inherent qualities, but it's also because of the Pulitzer Prize. And it is fascinating how these prizes can really catapult an author to this level of significance, empowering them to turn their hand to really different things.

Bernardine Evaristo is another example. Now in the UK with Penguin she's curating the Black Britain: Writing Back series — she constantly uses her position to shine a light on other writers and artists and designers and creative people that she thinks are doing interesting things. Again, that wouldn't have happened without the Booker Prize. She'd be just as interested and would love to do all those things, but she wouldn't be given those opportunities.

I feel a little bit similar as an editor. I think having had that success with The Sympathizer — which was a success before it won the Pulitzer, but which was transformative afterwards — allowed me to develop my career. It makes literary agents see you in a different way, it makes your colleagues see you differently —certainly my boss was like, yeah, good job, acquire the next thing, let's keep going! —and you feel a bit better about yourself. There's so much of this imposter syndrome that we all feel, and I definitely still feel that at times. But it's great to have this recognition of those accolades that are totally separate to you but that you can also claim something off as well.

You never know where these things are going to happen, and it's not a fair process. I think I've gotten very lucky early on in my career. But it's one of the ways that a literary book can really reach a mass audience, and what always surprises me is that people love those books when they read them. If you go on Goodreads and you look at the ratings for Shuggie Bain or The Sympathizer, these are books that people really enjoy, even though they could be thought of as difficult or literary or specific books. I think people's tastes are broader than we give them credit for sometimes.

TG: That brings me on to one more question, which is whether you could try to define your taste. There are some common threads in terms of the exploration of divided identities, strong narrative voices, and so on in books like Shuggie Bain and Freshwater. Are there certain things that you're conscious of looking for in a book?

PB: I think it quite often is the voice. I do like books that are focalized through a particular lens, often that ends up being the first person. I'm publishing an amazing debut novel soon with a section written as a letter [Zain Khalid's Brother Alive], and The Sympathizer is written as a confession. I think perhaps I'm drawn to writing that is not standard third-person narration. But I've also published books like that and love them too.

Humor is also a thread. The Sympathizer; Girl, Woman, Other; Shuggie Bain — humor is definitely something that carries you through the plot of those three books. Very different senses of humor, but it's there in all of them and it's there in some of the other books I'm publishing. Convenience Store Woman is a very funny book in its own way. I really want to publish books that tell me about things I don't know about, and so while I often feel that like all readers, I want some point of connection with what I'm reading, I don't want to be told a story that I already know.

I think I'm lucky in some ways because I have a pretty mixed identity. Obviously I've got different languages pointing me to different parts of the world. I lived in Russia, and I know about France and Germany, and then my mother being from Southeast Asia gives me a connection to that part of the world. Racially she's from India, so I'm also connected to India and the Punjab, and then I live in America, and the U.K. where I grew up is another place that's obviously very important to me. And I'm gay, so that also is an intersection that reacts to different kinds of texts.

And I think that allows me to often feel a point of connection with a book and with an author; often, when I'm talking to them, I'm not always talking to them from a position of being other. For instance with Akwaeke Emezi; our parents were born in Malaysia at a very similar time, and so while Akwaeke wrote this novel that's about Nigeria and Igbo ontologies that's incredible and so singular, as a person there are ways we have of connecting. It's something that could be a little tougher if you only connect to one place and you have a more normative identity. I feel that that impacts the books I'm publishing. I think I would have published Shuggie Bain if I wasn't gay, but I think if you've lived through a gay childhood — if you've been closeted — you understand a little bit of what that feels like for the character. It's hard to pin down why you're interested in something more than something else. Maybe it's that thing where you see yourself reflected, but you're also learning something different and exposing yourself to something completely new. But I'll keep thinking about it (laughs).

TG: That's a good answer! There is always that essential mystery to why you connect to a book.

PB: Well, I want to make a list that reflects the world, and that means that you have to publish books in translation, and it means you have to publish different kinds of forms. I'm not saying "Oh, I need to publish an African writer, or a first novel," or something. It just happens naturally. I do think there are some amazing editors who publish books that seem to be of a "school," and you feel that those authors are kind of in conversation with each other, and maybe know each other. And those are interesting lists, but I want to have a list that's broader than that.

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Tim Groenland is SFI/IRC Pathway Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where he is Principal Investigator on the project "The Publishing Infrastructures of Contemporary Anglophone Literature." His book The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic. 

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Banner image by Tyler Kinder

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