A Publisher's Perspective: the Pushkin Press and Fantasy in Translation Part 2 of 2 - Guest Daniel Seton

Do you have a recommendation for someone wanting to sort of dabble in French fantasy? Is there anything that you know? No, I do. I mean, a series that actually I tried to acquire, but I wasn't able to by crystal dabble, which actually is very, I think one of her main influences is Miyazaki. Let me just google what the English translation of the series was. I think it's the Mirror War for series. I think all four volumes of this series have been published in English now. The first one is called a Winters Promise. Yes, a Winters Promise. The Mirror Visitor, that's what's called. The Mirror Visitor series. And they are YA, a sort of steampunk YA, very influenced by Miyazaki, sitting in a kind of, well, to begin with anyway, a kind of steampunky Versailles fantasy world full of backstabbing and plotting and intrigue. And it's sort of seductive, but at the same time very cruel and scary place. I actually loved it. I really recommend those. I think that's a great example of the kind of fantasy that French fantasy writing can offer. Yes, and going back to the Dutch experience, you very recently sent me, is it the King of the Copper Mountain? Oh, yes. Which is obviously a classic work, but that's something I have found myself recommending to particularly parents with children who are just learning to get secure in reading because it has an element of repetition. But also what's really interesting about that is the good heartedness of it. It's definitely one thing where you feel, oh, this is a really lovely kind world. You've got sort of wonderfully absurd things happening like a series of bees turning up and telling the story and a dragon who gets in the, in the stables. But it's not, it doesn't follow, because in series of stories, it doesn't follow a conventional pattern. You're always surprised by it. Yes. I think that's what makes it so, one of the reasons why it's been so popular because it's just so perfect for reading aloud, I think, with children, which I think is so important. I think, well, that's why I fell in love with reading in the first place as being read to aloud and, you know, and not just picture books, my memory library novels together. And this is a novel for, I take seven plus children. But one that you could just have great fun reading aloud at bedtime, and it's split into these little chapters self-contained. What, and as you say, it's, it's so gentle and warm, and there's just this feeling of, of goodness about it, but it's really appealing. Absolutely. And wonderful role model for an older king. I actually made a list of top 10 fancy royalty over the Queen's Jubilee week. And that came in on my list, because I thought, that's a really nice version of a king. Someone who everybody's welcome. We'll fit you in somewhere in the past. So if you were going to look back at member yourself as a child, what were your go-to books, perhaps fantasy books, maybe that inspired you on the path? You mentioned that you read together with your parents, but what's your, your favourites from back then? Well, so many really, I really enjoy thinking about those times, because I just fell in love with reading quite early on, and there was so many amazing books to be to discover. I think probably the first, one of the first books that I read, and one of the, probably the first fantasy, but that I read was fittingly, it was The Hobbit, by talking, which, you know, just kind of blew me away, and, you know, I was pretty soon, I was like running around the playground at school, trying to get people to play at being like elves and dwarves and Hobbits with me and became obsessed and, you know, and read Lord of the Rings, and then I think that just gave me a taste for all kind of all things magical. And I read so many classics, really, but I just loved by authors like Diana Win Jones and Penelope Lively, Ghost of Thomas Kemp, or so an Oxford, Oxfordshire based book, I think. Alan Garner, you know, with Stony Brasingerman and Seacalls. And then I really got into Brian Jackson, the Red Wall books. Oh, yes. For those, yes, those are animal fables, aren't they, for those, you're not I'm across them. Yeah, they're kind of like Sylvainian families, meets Braveheart about this, also around Red Wall Abbey, which is like an abbey in the middle of a B-Colick landscape populated by these lovely woodland animals like mice and moles and rabbits. And they're invariably besieged by an army of rats and foxes and all the scary woodland animals basically. And it would culminate in a big battle. And I just couldn't get enough of them on must have read. I don't know, read them many, many times. And then another author that I think I, I moved on to because he also had the mice, the stars, his stories was Robin Jarvis. I don't know if you're familiar because that for my books also the witty witches. I'll absolutely love those. They're very different from Red Wall in the sense that they are much more magical, much darker and scarier. I mean, I think you could call them a horror really. There were some really frightening moments, really tragic moments to a real sense of magic and other worldliness about them that I can sort of still feel now and I think about them. And that's something that I, that's the scariness and the darkness that I found in those books is something that I think is quite rare actually for. To find in children's books, something that I loved and something that I think perhaps there should be more of. We're publishing a Finnish children's novel, this autumn, it's called History of Rosbury Hill. And it's kind of, it's a gothic, a gothic mystery set in a sanatorium in a snowy Finnish forest in the 1920s and it's about a young 12 year old girl who gets sent there to recover from tuberculosis. But she soon discovers that, you know, there are some mysterious goings on at this sanatorium and she tries to get to bottom of them. But well, I'm not going to spoil it for you, but it doesn't all go well and it sounds up to be quite a dangerous and scary place. And I heard the author of that either friend, she talks quite eloquently about how it's important to write scary stories for children because when the child is reading a story they're in control of what they're imagining and what they're picturing in their mind's eye and they can, they can sort of make it scary or is, you know, or tone it down as much as they want or they can stop when they want and go on when they, when they feel ready. It's not like when you're being assaulted by images from a TV screen, for example. So, yeah, and I agree with her. I think scary children's books, there should be more of them. And then on my journey, I suppose, well, I could go, I could see a forever listing of all the children's books that I loved. But when I was a 11, I think, was when Northern Lights came out by Philip Pullman and that just blew my mind as well. I could never read anything like that before. I remember taking it on holiday and, yeah, it was just incredible. I think it had all of the magic and adventure that I was used to and sort of addicted to by that time, but it also just had all this such depth and all these new ideas and references that I, you know, lived me down new paths. And also this, I loved something that really sort of sparked my imagination was this idea of alternate worlds, the idea that things could be different. If only for just some small changes here and there, we could be living in a completely different world. And that's once you realize that, it sort of opens the door to thinking about so many more fascinating things. It is interesting that the modern, well, they've been around since early in the 20th century, but the sort of multiverse concepts have always existed in fantasy with the, the underhill, the world of the Fay and, you know, the travelling between worlds has happened. We obviously traditionally, we all knew something, didn't we? Because it's been there in story, just the physicist a while to figure it out. So, yeah. Another, another great classic that I love when I was a kid, the world will be chased by Joan Aiken, which I didn't even realise at the time was like an alternate history, but it isn't it. It's like it's an England where the glorious revolution never, never happened. It's like a Catholic England, which I think went over my heads because when I first read it, yeah, it's interesting. Joan Aiken is a, I remember reading, she had some, one of the things that she does is really great titles for her books. And she, I think she perhaps has been a little bit forgotten. I'm sorry, collection of stories of her because the necklace of raindrops, which I kept boring again and again from the library, because I just love the title more than anything else about it. And again, with illustrations, I've got several of her as on my, my classic Georgians bookshelf in the other room. So, what about now? And you don't have to confine yourself to children's books. What's your top read of the last decade, would you say? A fantasy level. I find it quite hard to, I mean, I read what Susanna Clarks, you've got called. Piranasi. Piranasi last year, which I loved, I thought that was just almost impossibly mysterious and intriguing and like really paid off in the end. And I guess that reminded me of this is probably the more than the decade ago now, that Jonathan Clark, Jonathan Strangemist in the road. Yeah, that's the one. Came out. That was, I thought that was really striking, but just the sense of weirdness and otherness and like menace that she gave magical environment. It's a really distinctive and not really stayed with me. I think both her and Margaret Atwood show how you can do fantasy within a little, you know, a literary fiction tradition. It's quite often fantasy gets hived off into genre fiction. And people who sort of self select, they don't go and bother to look at themselves on the shelf if they don't like, you know, the walls and things. But both of those writers have found a route, which is respectable, as far as the living establishment is concerned. It's quite fascinating, really the politics of that. So tell us about the pushkin press. If you, are you a, you don't sound like a publisher who invites submissions, you go out and find things in translation that have been published, is that how it works for you? Well, no, we, for start, we don't only publish books in translation. So we, and we do publish English language original stuff as well. In terms of how we get our submissions, I mean, sometimes they're submitted to us by agents. A lot of the time they come from translators who do a really valuable job in, you know, not just in translating books, but in finding them and championing them. And in, you know, often, you know, they're the ones who have the first idea that I know this book deserves to be read in English. And yeah, and then there's a good amount of just kind of rummaging around and finding things, which is very enjoyable. And before your colleague gets deluged with unsolicited submissions, anyone listening to this who has a manuscript, do go and read what they want on the pushkin press website rather than just sent it in because, you know, it can be a bit of a nightmare for the editors if things come at them from all over. Yes. So Daniel, yeah, I don't want to get your colleague in trouble. But Daniel, when we finish our podcast, we always have a section where we have a little thing about where and all the fantasy that we've met be it in books or on film or wherever, would it be the best for something? And we've done all sorts of different subjects from where's the best place to get a magical sword or best place to go down the pub. But with you, I thought, where's the best place to be a publisher? Now, I think we probably have to expand the definition to include book seller or book creator. Otherwise, we might be very limited on our choices. Have you had a chance to think where you would like to sell books in which fantasy world? Hmm. I was trying to think about, yeah, I was trying to think of literary locations in fantasy world. It was quite fun. Something that really that came to my mind was some Terry Pratchett. Anc more pork and the library, actually, the unseen university. That has that amazing orangutan librarian and his full of all sorts of magical brimwars, et cetera. So that came to my mind. And also, if you don't mind me plugging another one of our books, there's going to be something. There's a wonderful German fantasy title called Bramble Fox by an author called Catherine Todassi. We're publishing it this autumn. Even though the author is German, it's set in Britain in Wales. And it's really informed by British mythology. And actually a lot of the classics that I've already mentioned. She has a real love for those two. So it's really interesting to see those reflected back by a German author. It's brilliant. I think people already already love it. But one of the protagonists of that book is called Ben. And he's a young world boy who works in a book shop with his mum. And so what I really like about the story is that he's having this amazing magical adventure. He goes through into fairy, the fairy world, encounters all sorts of peril. And he's experiencing it and viewing it through the lens of, you know, Tolkien. And all these other classics that we've been talking about. So he's kind of seeing this story through the prison of these, these books that we already love, which I think is really interesting. And anyway, in this fancy world, he finds a, an amazing, again, a library called, a place called World's End, which is kind of like a skyscraper driven down into the earth, just full of endless new books for him to read, which is like his idea of heaven. I thought that was such a lovely, such a lovely idea. I really enjoyed it. As for where it would be good to be a publisher or books. Yeah. Well, that's a bit tricky. I think for me, I would, I would really like to, it's probably a lot of our listeners are shouting this out at us. I'd quite like to be in Diagon Alley and have a bunch of shop down there. One that doesn't get blasted by death eaters. But yeah, that sounds quite fun. That's a great answer. But, you know, that's where I would pick. Well, thank you so much, Daniel, for talking to us, and giving us the publisher's perspective, and particularly bringing to our attention the books that we may not be aware of because of a English language bias that, you know, happens. And we'll put a link to the press in the show, that people can go and check out what the pushkin press gets up to. But so thank you very much for joining us, and look forward to really more of your books, hopefully, for a view. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been great fun. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. 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