Q: Your aim is to “give English book lovers a taste of true French reading, and to discover great fiction, written in English, from far and wide.” Tell us a little more about your publishing journey, and the importance of this mission.
A: There is sometimes a perception that translation is reserved for knock-out bestsellers and high-brow literary titles. At Gallic Books we’ve published prize-winners and powerhouse authors, but we always produce titles that can be enjoyed by a wide range of readers. Translated fiction doesn’t need to be alienating and exclusive.
Gallic Books began in 2007 with the tagline of ‘the best of French in English’. Since then, we’ve expanded. We’ve published French classics though our Editions Gallic list as well as English-speaking authors from around the globe, such as New Zealand legend Fiona Kidman and South Africa’s Henrietta Rose-Innes. We also have a selection of British writers including Edward Carey and Charles Lambert, though they live in Texas and Rome respectively. Even when we publish in English, we do it on a global scale. Though we’re a small team, we’re not afraid to tackle new and unusual projects. We publish a graphic novel version of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume mammoth In Search of Lost Time, and recently began a new list called Revolutionary Women, researching forgotten French women’s writing and presenting it in English, often for the first time.
Gallic Books is slightly unique in that much of our translation is done in-house. We’ve worked with plenty of incredible translators, but we also have members of the team who translate on top of their other publishing roles. This allows us a particularly close relationship with many of our books as we watch them unfurling into an English text, rather than them being delivered to us complete. We also run an independent bookshop! Belgravia Books was opened in 2011 and is a few minutes’ walk from Victoria Station in London. There is a lot of overlap between booksellers and publishers, as the bookshop and publishing offices are in the same building. As you can imagine this is great for looking at cover trends and thinking about formats and is bad for the wallets of our staff.
Q: Her Royal Highness, The Duchess of Cornwall is a fan of Gallic author, Antoine Laurain. She has endorsed The Reader’s Room, and has featured it on her bookstagram, @theduchessofcornwallsreadingroom. We’re excited to be working with you on the Mass Market paperback of this novel this season. Tell us about your experience of working with Clarence House, and the impact this has had for Antoine, and on the publishing journey for The Reader’s Room.
A: The Duchess of Cornwall first recommended Antoine Laurain’s The Red Notebook in a list of her favourite titles in spring of last year. The recommendation came just as bookshops had shut, and we were getting nervous about our ability to sustain ourselves through a pandemic. The list was printed in several newspapers and magazines, both in the UK and abroad, and was shared widely online. That one recommendation prompted an enormous swell in orders for The Red Notebook, with Amazon selling out within a few days. It also renewed interest in the rest of Laurain’s backlist. This flurry of attention was a godsend at a time when, like many other small publishers, we were unsure how big of a financial impact the pandemic would have. It gave us a bit of breathing room.
Antoine Laurain is one of our most beloved authors, so it was wonderful to see him introduced to a huge new audience, especially with the release of The Readers’ Room last Autumn. That boost of interest meant that Laurain’s latest novel, his best yet in our opinion, was snapped up by both his long-term, die-hard fans, and a swathe of new readers.
It is truly extraordinary to see the impact of a single endorsement from a Royal. In some ways in might be discouraging to see that one mention by a celebrity achieves more than months of in-house work, but we’ve found that the lesson is to take these moments when they come, and make them work as hard as possible for you. The Readers’ Room was made the Booksellers Association Book of the Month in October and was reviewed in many of the publications that shared Camilla’s original list. Clarence House have been nothing but supportive of us and we look forward to working with them further in the future, maybe in a way that brings Antoine Laurain to the UK!
Q: You publish a wide range of fiction, and specialise in translations of French literature. What do you look for when translating to English? What is your favourite part of this process?
A: As mentioned previously, it’s such a wonderful thing to see a French book slowly becoming an English book as it gets translated. There are a lot of tiny decisions to make that can affect the tone of a sentence, a chapter, or even the entire work. It’s very rewarding to feel like you’re getting that process of many tiny decisions right, and doing the book justice.
One of our 2020 titles, Wild Dog by Serge Joncour, had a dual timeline, and so we decided to have the alternating chapters translated by two different members of our team. It was interesting to see how a slightly different tone emerged for each half of the narrative, when in French they are stylistically quite similar.
Seeing this discussed, first by members of our team who didn’t read the original French, and later by reviewers, was a testament to the difference translation can make to a work. Although we feel that Wild Dog is faithfully recreated for an English audience, there is now a subtle difference between the two texts which only happened because of our choice to have two translators.
Q: What are you currently reading, or a recent book you really loved?
A: I’m currently reading The Swimmers by Chloe Lane, which is longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. We publish plenty of antipodean authors so we always want to stay across the best new fiction coming from that part of the world. The Swimmers follows a young artist, recently disgraced after an affair with the director of her gallery. She returns, after a long absence, to her family home, her terminally ill mother and her aunt-turned-carer. On arrival she learns that her mother plans to commit assisted suicide – the following Tuesday. What could be a melodramatic, overwrought story is instead a subtle, vibrant, surprisingly funny novel about three women trying to resolve their complex, difficult relationships in what little time they have left.
I am also reading Jack by Marilynne Robinson, having loved Gilead, Home and Lila.
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 | The Swallowed Man
9781913547035 | Paperback | $13.95 USD
World x CA, US Rights
| |  | The Readers' Room
9781913547004 | Paperback | $15.95 USD
World Rights
| |  | The Choke
9781910709627 | Paperback | $14.95 USD
World x CA, US Rights
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