| Gloucester Road Books opened in Bristol in April 2021, a year before Peirene Press moved to Bath the following May. Peirene had already been publishing for over ten years, but myself and my co-publisher Stella had recently taken over and were busy relaunching the list, developing the brilliant work and backlist built by our predecessor and the founder of the press Meike Ziervogel. We updated the design, expanded the list from European-novella-focussed to International-not-only-novella-focussed and moved our centre of operations to Bath. Part of what encouraged us to do this was the wealth of fantastic bookshops, many of them fairly new, in Bath and Bristol – I won’t name them all for fear of missing someone out, but there are at least seven indy bookshops across the two cities worth your time (why not do one a day this Independent Bookshop Week?)
Since our relaunch in May 2022, we have published 25 books from 16 countries and 4 continents. It’s been an exciting time for translated fiction, with more and more readers discovering that there is a world not only beyond English language fiction, but also beyond Nordic crime and Russian classics (much as I love Stieg Larsson and Leo Tolstoy). There are as many ways of looking as the world as there are writers writing about the world, and it’s great to see bookshop tables heaving with new perspectives. If you’d been reading along with Peirene in the last four years, you would have travelled to the Thai jungle, where a monk recounts his youth hunting potentially demonic tigers, to Germany in the 1990s, in the company of four siblings travelling to Istanbul in the wake of their father’s death, and to the Accursed Mountains of Albania, to discover the world of Bekija, a ‘sworn virgin’ who renounces her womanhood to live as a man and escape an arranged marriage. Over the next year or so, we’ll be publishing our first translations from Greek, Welsh and Vietnamese.
We are only able to keep exploring the world’s literature if there are readers willing to take the journey with us. And without bookshops to connect us to readers, where on earth would we be? So it’s a pleasure to partner with one of the best around. Happy Independent Bookshop Week to all who celebrate – may your tote bags be heavy with whatever you love to read.
-James Tookey |
