Paul Beatty’s Man Booker prize success this week marked the second win in a row for the small independent publisher Oneworld, after Marlon James last year. It’s an impressive performance from a press which, while founded in 1986, began to publish fiction only five years ago. But Oneworld – now rushing through a major reprint of Beatty’s winning title, The Sellout – is not the only small publisher making waves.
The Independent Publishers’ Guild (IPG) points out that 19 of the 36 Booker-shortlisted books of the last six years have been published by its members; along with Beatty, this year’s six-strong shortlist featured two other titles from independent presses – Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, from Granta, and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, from Saraband.
And it’s not just in fiction. The four-strong shortlist for this year’s Baillie Gifford award for non-fiction includes two titles from small presses, Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, from Fitzcarraldo, and Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, from Granta.
Meanwhile Vahni Capildeo, who won the Forward poetry prize for best collection for Measures of Expatriation, published by Carcanet, has just made it on to the shortlist for the TS Eliot prize for the same collection, alongside Ruby Robinson’s Every Little Sound from Liverpool University Press, and Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Seasons of Cullen Church, from Faber.
As the poet Ruth Padel, who is chairing the TS Eliot judges, says, “It is clear that such publishers are radically altering the landscape of contemporary poetry.”
Juliet Mabey, of Oneworld, said of Beatty’s prizewinning novel: “Publishers in the UK might have felt it was ‘too American’ to sell well here, but it was so brilliantly written, and dealt with such an important issue, I had to have it on my list. I’m thrilled that the Man Booker judges have recognised this as well.”
