Five minutes with Liz Calder

The most prized possession on my bookshelves is a copy of the commemorative book that Bloomsbury published and I edited to help celebrate the author Russell Hoban’s 80th Birthday in 2005. It was signed in London by Hoban, and page 33 has now also been signed by his publisher, Liz Calder, who also contributed a short article. We fans of Hoban—a writer who has said that none of his adult novels has ever recouped the publisher’s advance—have good reason to thank her. It is clear she is a lover of literature, and not only of books that make a mint.

You only have to talk to her for a couple of minutes to realise that she is someone very special. Her uncanny ability to unearth and then nurture writing talent and often to convert that into vast quantities of dosh while still remaining endearingly human has led writers such as Michael Ondaatje to say that she is “sane, calm and generous—at ease with herself. It’s astonishing she’s survived in a world that’s cut-throat”. And the man who head-hunted her 20 years ago, Bloomsbury Publishing chairman Nigel Newton, says he did so because “she had highly attuned literary interests, strong commercial judgment and was loved in the industry—she’s the best there is”.

Calder lived in New Zealand in the 1950s, and went to school in Palmerston North before returning to England in 1958. NZBC wanted to know what changes she had noticed here since, and politely test her knowledge of our literature.

How familiar are you with New Zealand writers?

“I would say not familiar at all. My job has changed in the last few years so that I’m now semi-retired and I work only a few days a week. I’ve read Mister Pip. A long time ago, back in the early 1990s, we were doing an annual anthology called Soho Square and we had a different editor every year, and one year we had Bill Manhire, and that’s when I first encountered Lloyd Jones and we had a piece of his in it. I’ve read Emily Perkins because we’re publishing her. I’ve read a few things in the last few years but really I haven’t kept up with it very much. But if I didn’t read another new book, I would still have a lifetime of reading waiting for me.”

How do you prioritise reading for pleasure?

“Well, until a year ago I didn’t do any reading that wasn’t related to work—but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t pleasurable because it was. So I didn’t in that sense miss it. But since I’ve been involved in this literary festival in Brazil [Flip, the Parati International Festival of Literature] I’m reading much more stuff. This Nigerian woman [Calder points to a paperback on her table], Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus was her first novel and she had another one, Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize, and she’s coming to our festival in July and I wanted that. So I now read a lot more than previously and I’m catching up with some of the things, but I haven’t really begun. There’s so much! Even classics, rereading Dickens last year… or beginning to.”

Do you maintain a ‘Books to read’ log?

“No, perhaps I should. An antiquarian bookseller I knew years ago was a voracious reader and she would read everything and had a huge library. She wrote down, in notebooks, every book she ever read, with the date, the publisher’s name and her comments. She died and I don’t know what happened to her books, but she was a habitual cataloguer so everything had to be written down. I’m certainly not like that.”

Which other books that you’ve read for pleasure in the last year have excited you?

“Zadie Smith On Beauty I thought was brilliant—a really extraordinary, wonderful book about families. I read an early William Boyd called Any Human Heart, which I thought was very good and not like many of his books which are much more like adventure. His last one, which we just published, called Restless, is almost a spy-thriller.”

Your parents emigrated to New Zealand in 1949. It must have been a quite different country then. What do you make of all the changes?

“I was here in the 1950s and some people think that New Zealand remained in the 1950s for quite a few decades to follow. Louis [Baum, Calder’s publisher/writer husband] was here in 1984 and I’ve been back a few times since, but the changes in the last 20 years have been enormous and really fantastic. It’s great to see New Zealand is now actually ahead of the world in so many respects, whereas it always used to be trailing behind and old-fashioned. I find it very exciting to see.

“I think the changes are really noticeable. The whole food and wine culture, the fashion business. The one thing that was always good, in a way, was the book trade and the booksellers. There were very good bookshops always, and particularly in Palmerston North. But things like food and clothes and wine or anything else were pretty grim. And the roads now are so wonderful! For an English person driving here, it’s a piece of cake. Hardly any traffic and these open, well-kept roads, easy to get from one place to another. And also architecture, just the look of things. You go into a little restaurant in the sticks, in some one-horse town, and it’s really, really nice, the food is excellent and they’ve got a nice little back place where you can sit in the sun. Lovely.”

Do you still have family living here?

“My sister, who’s in the Wairarapa, to whom I’m very close, and two brothers, one in Taupo and one in Wanganui, and we’ve just had a fantastic reunion, down the Wairarapa. I don’t come back that regularly. The last time was 10 years ago. But we keep in touch quite closely on the phone and one thing and another. My sister won’t travel, so I have to do the shuttling back and forth.”

You were here for your birthday?

“Yes. We had a hilarious time and sang all the old songs. In those days there was no television and there was nothing much else, and my mother played the piano. We sang everything, all the time: hymns and light opera and pop songs, as far as we had any. So we got out all the old music and went through it all again.”

Do you see the internet and digital media as a threat or an opportunity for books?

“I might be burying my head in the sand, but I don’t really think the sort of books I care about are threatened by the internet, nor do I think it’s an opportunity, particularly! I think great literature will continue to be published in the form in which we know it because of its tangible, long-lasting character. People will want to keep books, they don’t just want to download a pile of paper and put it up in their bookshelves. It’s not going to happen. And I don’t think people are particularly going to read their favourite authors on e-readers, either.

“But having said that, for publishing generally there are definitely opportunities. And although at the moment I don’t know how much publishers are making use of it, certainly in the areas of non-fiction and reference it’s the obvious thing because it’s something that can be constantly updated and books, say, on health and all these other subjects that need constant updating can be produced much more easily and cheaply.”

Have you seen the Amazon Kindle e-reader?

“No. Bloomsbury is supposed to be developing one, and almost every publisher says they are, but I don’t know to what degree any of them have actually got them beyond the early stages.”

Haven’t publishers missed an opportunity to create customised author sites with multimedia content (podcasts and interviews) to drive book sales?

“You know, we do have that, in a way. Just before I left England our techie person filmed me talking to Joanna Trollope and her reading a bit, and it’s going out on the website. We haven’t got it going quite as much as you’re suggesting, but it’s definitely a good idea.”

What effect has the Harry Potter phenomenon had on JK Rowling?

“Obviously, when somebody gets as much success as that and as much money as that, you think that can’t be good for the soul. But from all I know—and I don’t know Jo Rowling that well, I’ve met her a few times—I really find her to be a tremendously sensible and unaffected, down-to-earth sort of person. The only downside, I would say, is that I think she puts on too much makeup now. But apart from that I don’t think she’s spoilt too much—although her life must be pretty weird. But she does give away huge amounts of money to charities and to concerns she has. What do you do if you suddenly get deluged with money?”

A pre-Christmas article in the New Yorker quoted sociologists speculating that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class”, as it was in the days before mass literacy. Do you agree with that?

“In some ways you could say it already is. You know, it’s not a mass habit in the way that football is, or movies are, really. We’re involved in this literary festival in Brazil and we get 25,000 people coming to that, which is really amazing in a country where the percentage of people who can read is quite small. The great mass of people in Brazil can’t afford to buy a magazine, never mind a book. But in the western world, I suppose, it is a fairly specialist pursuit, and hardbacks are out of the reach of most people, certainly young people. But that sounds a very gloomy prognosis—is that all the writer said, or did he say a whole lot of other things as well…?”

Latin-American and non-English-speaking writers are being translated far more nowadays, aren’t they?

“That’s true. When I went into publishing, you rarely saw a book by someone with a foreign name; and indeed, the booksellers didn’t like them. They didn’t sell and so you were warned off them, warned off translations—it’s too expensive, nobody wants them. And now it’s almost a selling point to have a name that nobody can pronounce. A certain kind of metropolitan reading community just really loves that feeling. I mean, look at the Khaled Hosseini books about Afghanistan, there’s no way that 20 years ago I could have imagined a book like that selling what it sold. So that’s a positive thing. And as you say, many more publishers are translating them as a result.”

What’s the effect of publishing consolidation on unpublished or beginning writers? Do you have any advice for them?

“The really weird thing that’s happened in British publishing is that all the great editors have become agents. The fact is that there are a hell of a lot of agents now. So I would say to somebody who has written either a novel or a part of a novel and believes that it should see the light of day, they should write a good, short letter explaining what it is that they’re sending, but not rambling on about every other thing on their mind, and send in a couple of chapters with the letter, to one of these proliferating new agents because there are so many of them and they must be looking for new writers. And that’s the only way they’re going to get them—or that’s the most common way, anyway.

“The editor at Picador, Peter Strauss, became an agent three years ago and I thought that was extraordinarily sad for publishing because he was a very good editor and a very good publisher. I think it must be something to do with editors getting fed up with the whole corporate way of doing things and the dominance of the sales and marketing people, and they want a little more autonomy. As an agent they can build their list and do what they like with it, but soon there’s going to be no editors for them to send their books to. They’ll all be agents.”

Are you still involved in the Groucho Club?

“No, we’re not. We were at the beginning but it was actually our idea, Louis’ and mine, but we then gathered a group of publishing people together and then we found some people who actually knew how to run such a thing as a club or a bar, so they really got the thing up and running, and it was great—it’s still going. We were on the board for about 10 years and then we got slung off.”

Slung off or you slung yourselves off?

“Well, it was a bit of both. But the executive members of the board wanted to sell out and they wanted us out of the picture, basically. And by then there was Louis and me and a couple of other publishers still on the board. It wasn’t our core business, by any means, but it was quite fun, seeing it grow. It has served a purpose and filled a need at the time. Now there are thousands of similar clubs.”