Brow Books enters into co-publishing agreement with Tilted Axis Press
Brow Books has announced it will enter into a co-publishing agreement with UK-based Tilted Axis Press.
Under the new agreement, Tilted Axis will hold world English rights for each title it publishes, and will offer right of first refusal in Australia and New Zealand to Brow Books. The long-term partnership is the first international co-publishing agreement for both publishers.
The partnership will officially launch with the ANZ publication of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairytale (translated from the Korean by Janet Hong) through Brow Books in August. Yujoo will tour Australia in August, as a fellow of the 2018 Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program (WrICE), a reciprocal cultural exchange of writers from the Asia-Pacific region.
Brow Books publisher Sam Cooney told Books+Publishing that the Tilted Axis titles it chooses to publish in Australia and New Zealand will receive ‘the full Brow Books treatment’, including new covers and full redesigns, as well as the Australian publisher’s full publicity and marketing efforts.
Cooney said the Brow Books team is ‘thrilled’ to be in partnership with ‘a small press that clearly prioritises similar concerns’, adding, ‘it’s about time we over here [in Australia and New Zealand] had the opportunity to read such exquisite stories from near and far corners of the world that have been too long ignored.’
‘It’s a terrific partnership for us, not only because Tilted Axis publish superb translations, but more because of the way they go about it: they seek out and translate literary works from corners of the globe that are rarely translated into English for the Western world, and they do so not by looking for their books to be “cultural tourism”, so to speak, but rather they discover and publish the most innovative and challenging writing from these oft-ignored places/languages,’ said Cooney. ‘It’s the quality of the writing/art that matters first and foremost.’
Tilted Axis publisher Deborah Smith said of Brow Books: ‘Their tastes and production values are very much comparable with our own, and their diverse, exciting list seemed an obvious home for our titles. Plus, their willingness to try something new in terms of a co-publishing agreement fits perfectly with our own desire to explore innovative new models.’
Tilted Axis Press was founded in London in 2015 as a non-profit organisation dedicated to publishing contemporary Asian literature, mainly by women. It is interested in publishing books that show ‘artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new’. The small press has published seven novels translated from the Bengali, Uzbek, Thai and Korean. Tilted Axis founder and publisher Deborah Smith translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Portobello Books), for which Smith and Kang were co-winners of the Man Booker International Prize in 2016.
As previously reported by Books+Publishing, literary journal The Lifted Brow launched its books imprint Brow Books in 2017 and recently sold UK and Commonwealth rights to Intan Paramaditha’s short-fiction collection Apple and Knife to Harvill Secker, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.
Category: Local news
