The author-maker

Gargi Gupta / New Delhi June 10, 2006

Liz Calder is perhaps the closest the publishing industry has to a star.

In a trade in which failures outnumber successes many times over, Calder seems to have what Salman Rushdie once called a “nose” for winners, with a list of “discoveries” that reads like a who’s who of critically acclaimed and popular authors from around the globe — including Rushdie himself, Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, David Gutterson, Sophie Dahl...and, most famously, J K Rowling.

Calder is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded Bloomsbury Publishing, which today is one of the biggest and most successful independent publishing houses.

A few years ago, she began organising the Parati International Festival of Literature in Parati, Brazil, a country Calder confesses to being in love with and where she now spends three months every year.

No wonder then that this visit to India, her first, has been such a frenzied round of meetings with local publishers and agents, visits to bookstores, back-to-back interviews with the media and her official engagements for British Council.

But if the 68-year old is tired, then there’s just the barest trace of it in her steady grey eyes, her firm voice as she settles down next to husband Louis Baum in a shaded corner of the poolside at the Oberoi Grand in Kolkata for her last Q&A with a journalist before she leaves for Delhi.

The conversation, quite naturally, veers to Harry Potter, the boy wizard who has worked magic on Bloomsbury’s bottomline and topline. In the financial year ending December 31, 2005, Bloomsbury posted a 29.2 per cent hike in turnover to £109.11 million, with net cash balances of £53.51million — most of it Potter proceeds.

For Calder, Pottermania is testimony to the power of the written word for a generation that grew up watching TV — the discovery that sitting quietly and engaging with a book, making up the imagery as you went along, can be exciting too. “It’s something of your own, it’s not something that’s being done to you,” she says.

So, is Bloomsbury looking at India? Not just yet. “But we’re always looking,” says Calder, who now works only part-time at Bloomsbury.

“The idea is to expand organically rather than by acquisitions. We set up Bloomsbury US from scratch. We have since acquired Walker Books. We acquired a small literary house in Germany called Berlin Verlag and established, alongside of it, Bloomsbury Germany with a slightly more popular list. In the UK, there was A&C Black, and several small companies. We’ve just acquired Metheun’s Drama List.”

And what about an Indian author? For someone who midwived Midnight’s Children, the book that gave a new lease of life to Indo-English fiction, the future lists of Bloomsbury are curiously devoid of any writer from India, or South-east Asia — unless William Dalrymple is considered an honorary Indian.

There’s Michael Ondaatje, of course (another of Calder’s discoveries), and Calder is quick to point out that she’d published Amitav Ghosh’s first novel, The Shadow Lines.

“I have to confess to having concentrated a bit more in the last few years on South American and Portuguese writing,” she acknowledges. “I’ve always been very keen, obviously, since Midnight’s Children changed my life.”

Hopefully, now that she’s experienced the country firsthand, India will figure more in her scheme of affairs.