Publisher’s Weekly, heading this feature on us in their current UK Publishing Supplement, brand Barbican Press a radical publisher.
I’m happy with the tag, but how did it come about and how well does it stand up?
We were founded in 2009, but publishing really kicked in with D. D. Johnston’s Barbican Press | The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub in 2012. At the time I was a professor of creative writing, and this was D.D. Johnston’s PhD thesis. He had written it, willfully, to be unpublishable. That meant refusing to make any of the compromises needed to pass all the barriers for mainstream publication. The novel is scabrous, inventive, intellectually acute, packs in tales of the Spanish and Ukrainian civil wars, is an explosively accurate campus comedy, and so we took the challenge. We published the unpublishable as our first lead title. It’s brilliant. Was longlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.
And yes, it’s radical.
We do have a bestseller, Barbican Press | The Headscarf Revolutionaries by Brian Lavery. Brian doesn’t look to grab headlines as a working-class writer, but he could. And this powerfully dramatized story of Lilian Bilocca, the fishwife who in the wake of trawling disasters downed her filleting knife and brought out the town’s women to protest shipping laws, brought the people of the city together. Crowds massed into the local minster for readings and performances empowered by Brian’s work. Women previously marginalized by history became embraced as heroes of Hull. Brian’s is radical work.
My sense of my own writing is that it provides counter narratives. Many books tell stories that accept social norms of behaviour. What are the stories that challenge those norms? That interests me in my writing, and I know how hard it is to get such pieces placed. In Barbican Press I’ve offered to writers the sort of home I’ve often wished existed for my own work.
I’ve had one fear: the books we publish are world class. A mainstream publisher sells many more copies of its titles than we do. Our authors often struggle for money, so it would be better for them to have a commercial success. For years I worked with literary agents to try and place elsewhere, in both the UK and USA, works Barbican Press was set to publish, and win for our authors the handsome advances we don’t pay. Often we got positive feedback from editors, but somebody in the wider publishing team always said no. And so Barbican was freed to bring these tough monsters of books into the world.
I’m often bored by the works mainstream culture reviews and approves of. I’m wildly excited by the books we bring out. They give me great company and make me see the world differently. Their authors have stepped beyond constraints. I’d like the world to be radical enough that it sees these books as normal.
We publish companionable books for radical readers.
Writing tip: Find this big virtue in rejection: your work is yours again. You still get to play with it, to create into it. It’s like you sent your child out into the world, with great hopes, but love to have them home again.
A Substack I follow: Kathleen Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential - a publicist’s frank take on finding a market for books in a shifting landscape.
A privilege to be published by Barbican Press - thank you for being such a daring publisher!