Join us for a session on Swiss Publishing and Literature in Translation: Switzerland has four official languages with publishers operating in all four. Hear from some Swiss publishers about their markets, as well as some British publishers who publish literature in translation.
Speakers include: Yannick Stiassny from Editions Zoé, Daniel Kampa from Kampa Verlag, Francois von Hurter from Bitter Lemon Press and Juliet Mabey from Oneworld Publications – in conversation with Emma House and Rosie Goldsmith.
Join us on https://www.facebook.com/groups/publisherswithoutborders
Friday 17th July at 15.00 BST / 16.00 CET
While studying literature and communication, Yannick Stiassny also learns the publishing profession in various Swiss and European publishing houses. He joined éditions Zoé in 2014 where he works now as deputy publisher.
Daniel Kampa was born on August 23, 1970 in Luxembourg to Polish parents and grew up there as well as in Germany and France.
He worked as a bookseller whilst studying in Switzerland and then did internship.in publishing houses and literary agencies in New York and London before joining Diogenes in Zurich in 1994. There he became assistant to the founder of the publishing house Daniel Keel, who died in 2011. He supported the legendary publisher in programming and discovering new authors and was instrumental in successfully reviving modern classics such as Georges Simenon, F. Scott Fitzgerald or W. Somerset Maugham.
He worked at Diogenes for 20 years, from 2005 on as member of the board of Directors, to become publisher of Hoffmann und Campe Verlag in Hamburg in 2013, before establishing Kampa Verlag in Zurich in 2018.
Born in Geneva in 1946, François von Hurter went to university in Fribourg and did his Swiss military service mostly in Thun. After relentlessly recommending books to friends for thirty years, Laurence Colchester, his brother and him decided to start a small publishing house in 2004. Sixteen years and more than a 100 books later we plod on, having fun and meeting people like Jacques Chessex. A privileged existence.
Juliet Mabey is co-founder and Publisher of Oneworld Publications, set up in 1986 as an independent family-owned publishing house focusing on high quality narrative non-fiction across a range of subjects from politics and popular science to history, philosophy and psychology. She launched a literary fiction list in 2009 with the publication of Marlon James’ second novel, The Book of Night Women, and his third novel went on to win the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, and Tayari Jones won the Women’s Prize for Fiction with An American Marriage in 2019. She now publishes about 10 novels a year, about 25% in translation, as well as overseeing Oneworld‘s crime and children’s lists.
Oneworld publishes award-winning international literary fiction and non-fiction that is not only entertaining but also stimulating, provocative, sometimes challenging and always superbly written. In 2015 Oneworld won the Man Booker Prize with Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, and in 2016 it won again with Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. Our fiction list includes translated fiction from a wide variety of languages, from Icelandic and Danish to Algerian-French, Portuguese and Slovenian, representing authors from 27 countries. Our non-fiction covers a broad range of subjects from history and politics to popular science, nature and biography, and we recently won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize and the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
In 2015 Oneworld set up a children’s imprint, Rock the Boat, which publishes high-quality YA, Middle Grade and picture books, including non-fiction, and in 2016 launched Point Blank to showcase brilliant crime fiction, some of which is in translation.