The American University in Cairo (AUC) Press is recognised as the leading English-language publisher in the Arab World, with a backlist of 1000 titles. It publishes annually up to 100 new schoalrly and general interest titles on the region, as well as Arabic literature in translation, most notably the works of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Mark Linz has been a senior international publishing executive for over 40 years and has served as Director of the AUC Press for more than 10 years.
Mark can be contacted on linz@aucegypt.edu
The AUC Press will be on stand K405 (shared with Eurospan) at the London Book Fair 2008
The press was established in 1960 and like may other university presses it was an outgrowth of departments that had an interest in publishing their own materials. I arrived in 1984 and was asked to make plans for how the press should continue. We focused on making it a professional press, working to international standards and also on publishing works that were unique to our particular position here. So we made a conscious decision to cover Arabic literature in translation, Islamic art and architecture and what we now call Middle East studies, from history through anthropology, economics, politics and religious studies. And, of course, what is unique to Egypt – Ancient Egypt, travel etc. Initially this was quite a modest progamme - we didn’t publish more than 15-20 books a year. A major watershed for us was becoming, in 1985, Naguib Mahfouz’s publisher in English and his agent for all other language editions except Arabic. Now, 20 years later, there are well over 500 foreign language editions of his works in over 40 languages and the numbers continue to grow. Since his death we have continued to publish a couple of his books each year and at some point in the next few years a set of all 40 of his novels will be complete.
In 1995, after things had moved forward surprisingly well, I was asked to come back and review the situation and I ended up staying! We then made a plan for the next 5 years to double, or even triple, our publishing volume. Since 9/11 interest in the Middle East has increased enormously, for perhaps the wrong reasons, and we have responded to that by publishing more books in more subjects, both scholarly and general interest. Currently we are publishing up to 90 titles each year and our goal is to be publishing up to 100 titles by the time we reach our 50th anniversary in 2010. Our backlist is now around 1000 titles.
Distribution is, of course, key – a book is not published until it’s sold as they say. It’s a difficult task in Egypt, although compared to 1984 it’s improved enormously. We ourselves are facilitating distribution through another bookstore on with the new campus and by renovating our Downtown bookstore completely. Also our work with, and encouragement of, many other bookstores in Egypt has changed the landscape here. In the Middle East at large it is still difficult to sell books in an professional way, the way we are used to doing in Europe and North America but a lot is being done in this area, including of course the work the British Council is supporting and efforts in other countries, all helping to make this a more professional landscape. More important for us is to bring the literature, the culture, the story of the Middle East to those outside the Middle East. Our results are generally moderate except from time to time when we have spectacular sales. Mahfouz was and still is enormous – well over a million books sold in the English speaking world. And already, in a little over two years, over half a million books of Al Aswany sold in almost 20 languages. That’s quite unusual. The press itself has grown from a few people to around 70 including bookshop personnel and our small print shop.
One important experience for us in the last 10 years or so has been to introduce launch events for books as is done all the time in Europe and the United States as part of a marketing campaign. Here, though, it was something new. We often hold receptions to launch a book or series of books wonderful historical venue such as Mohamed Ali’s Palace. Astonishingly Egypt has grown to like these and sometimes several hundred people show up. We did a book about the churches of Egypt and held the reception in the courtyard of the Coptic Museum and there were 350 people there for the performances and readings and dinner! The publication of a book should be a celebration.
We have considerable momentum at the moment with our annual Naguib Mahfouz Prize, which draws a lot of interesting new material. We have a tough time keeping our programme down to 15-20 books a year. In total we have about 150 titles, either already published or in preparation, of Arabic literature in translation. About 30 of these are Naguib Mahfouz titles.
I don’t think so. I’ve said this many times, translations are not the most popular genre of book to do, especially in the English speaking world because you have big enough markets to deal with your own literature and so it’s always been specialised publishers, often in Paris, London or Berlin, producing literary translations. There is really no one specialising in translating Arabic literature except AUC Press. We hope more and more publishers will pick up a book as they now do, ideally bestsellers but one never knows in advance! Of course over the last two or three decades there were publishers, especially in the UK, who specialised either because their background was in the Middle East, for example Saqi and Garnet and at one time Heinemann had a series of Arab writers, but it never really grew into anything substantial. Spain translates a lot of Arabic literature. In fact Spain has more translations of Mahfouz than we do – they have 35 and we have 32!
Of course - publishers like to get some credit from time to time! There is obviously some truth in it for reasons already mentioned – people obviously don’t know how to assess works in languages like Arabic. Once Mahfouz’s books became available in prominent languages like English, but also French and German, he was accepted more readily and people were more familiar with the work. He said it and we were happy! At the time of the Nobel Prize I believe we had 7 or 8 titles in print. When I came back in 1995 we had published about 17 titles and he thought that was it, finished, but we were interested in expanding and by his 90th birthday we had 19 titles (fiction and autobiographical works) and wanted to make a set of 20 books – it didn’t make sense to have a set of 19 books! We decided to re-translate and publish Children of Gebelawi, which had always been published outside Egypt and imported because of its controversial nature. When he finally said OK let’s make it part of the set, nobody raised an eyebrow and this very important book is now part of the canon in English and in many other languages. For his 95th birthday, which he didn’t quite reach, we had planned the 25-volume set. We also prepared a volume called ‘Life’s Wisdoms’ which culls the wisdom from his fiction. It was quite a labour of love for Aleya Serour who used to work for us. It was just finished and going into production as he passed away and turned out to be a wonderful testimonial to him. Aleya also did an Arabic version with Dar al Shorouk in Egypt. So the momentum keeps going and I think everyone knows that the Arab world is very very rich in writers. My publishing colleagues joke sometimes that there are more writers than readers in the Arab world and there is some truth in this! Everybody’s writing and a lot of novels are published in the Arab world, but translating them is a different story.
We have confidence in our ability to select and a lot of experience at what we do and we also consult colleagues in the university. There are a lot of people who are very up-to-date on good quality current Arabic literature in both our literature and Arabic studies departments. And many of the authors who’ve been published by us advise on what should come next. The market also gives us information - some books sell better than others, some books travel better than others to, say, London or New York.
Though Egypt is heavily represented, as is only natural when you look at its demographics and cultural development, we have works from Morocco through to Iraq. We always wanted to have the canon of what you might call ‘modern Arabic literature’ and cover both classics, such as Taha Hussein to Alaa Al Aswany and younger more experimental authors, like Ahmed Alaidy. We like to keep the balance between classic and new and between young and old and between women and men. Although, of course, we can’t keep everyone happy!
The whole translation question is a big one. I’ve been in the translation business ever since I got into publishing, but did nothing with the Arab world until I got here. In 1984, when we re-organised and re-directed the work of the press and began to professionalise our work, there was only a handful of translators and they often worked on translations of a book together! Several of the Mahfouz books were done by 2 or 3 translators. That’s how difficult it was. Before 1995 we were publishing Mahfouz and an occasional other writer. After 1995 we decided to expand and consistently publish a dozen books each year. There is a kind of critical mass you need to make an impact. A lot of people came and offered their services as translators and a small number were very good. Some are brilliant and have won awards. Farouk Abdel Wahab, for example, started working with us just over 10 years ago on the first novel that won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s book The Other Place. Since then he’s done one book after another and he’s not shied away from rather massive tomes – he’s currently doing Gamal Al-Ghitany’s 1000-page book Manifestations. Last year, of course, Denys Johnson-Davies received, deservedly so, the Sheikh Zayed Award for Cultural Personality of the Year, exactly 60 years after he translated the first short story by Mahfouz in 1947 at the age of 25. He has a lot of stories to tell and you should read Memories in Translation: life between the lines of Arabic literature. Humphrey Davies is another great example – he discovered himself as a translator not too long ago and has done a full range of experimental literature which other people may have shyed away from, such as The Yacoubian Building and Being Abbas Al Abd.
So, very few translators and no reliable place where translators can become translators. This is true in many other languages areas as well, but there is a long tradition of translations in and out of French and in and out of English especially but you don’t have this tradition here. We’ve faced an enormous task finding, encouraging and working with translators these last 20 years. And I’m happy to say there is now a reliable, though rather small, group of really high quality literary translators. Having said all that, we could easily provide up to a dozen more translators with regular work!
In Europe and the United States working internationally when they publish a book is something that comes naturally to publishers, which isn’t the case for authors and publishers in the Middle East. For this reason it isn’t always clear where the rights sit. Unless you know exactly how to discover the next best seller in the Arab world (and it’s often not what sells well in the Arab world that also sells well abroad), my advice is to go initially to what is already available or in preparation in translation. The few publishers, including ourselves, that do translate would be glad to work with you in the early stages when the translated manuscript is being prepared. Even before that stage, publishers often have their own reports on books – we don’t just publish a book because the author has a pretty face! We review the books and the peer review process is pretty well established in university presses. We don’t have an overly commercial mandate, so we can play the role of adviser as well as selling rights in a professional way. The advantage in this is that you have a book that is already reviewed carefully, that is often already translated. This saves you from the two major obstacles you would have in publishing in translation from the Arabic. One is making the decision on whether or not you want to publish this book and secondly finding a translator and being able judge whether the translation is good or not, because there are very few Arabic-speaking editors in the English-speaking world. So to use a couple of Arabic phrases ‘ahlan wa sahlan’ (hello and welcome) and ‘bayti baytak’ (my house is your house) . We’ll be glad to advise and to provide these translations. How things may develop in the coming years isn’t clear. We might say we need agents, but no agent will make a living just selling the translation rights of a few books and it’s not customary for an author here to go to a publisher through an agent, though there are always one or two exceptions. Gamal Al Ghitany is represented by a French publisher. We’ve handled Naguib Mahfouz’s rights in 40 different languages for 20 years, much accelerated in the last 10 years, so there is a network of publishers interested and who will regularly publish books from the Arab world. And, of course, there are authors who we do not publish and other publishers will discover them!
We go to Frankfurt and we go to London and wherever the annual US convention is – you know it rotates from city to city. We have also, from time to time, gone to other book fairs to network and establish contacts – as far away as China and as close as Maadi (a suburb of Cairo)! This year we’re participating for the second time in the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, where an enormous amount of money is being invested. This is good news, but publishing really needs to be market driven and not just a cultural project. It needs to grow and there is no better way to do this than through market-directed professional effort. We’ve just had a great book fair here in Cairo – there were certainly more than a million visitors, although some people talk about 3 million! We did quite well. We did better than last year, which is what everyone wants to do. It’s quite wonderful to have so many people come to a book fair to buy books. It’s different from the London Book Fair, which is principally a professional fair, as is Frankfurt, even though they open to the public for a couple of days.
Several of our authors will be there, for example Alaa Al Aswany. We are available to participate in any of the activities that the British Council or the London Book Fair will run. Otherwise we’ll do what we always do and focus on what’s in our catalogue. Twice a year we not only produce our general trade catalogue, but also create a special rights catalogue. Already our diary is filling up with meetings with publishers and editors from around the world. We have everything from new literature to political titles and a major reference work this year on Arabic women writers from 1873 to 1999 focusing on 1200 women writers in the Arab world from Morocco to Iraq – their life and work including bibliographies. It’s been in the works for some time now as it took a huge amount of research - the Arabic language edition has been out for some years.
The AUC is moving to its fantastic new campus this year, which is deeply challenging for the whole university. It’s a hugely ambitious project historically, educationally and technologically. The main centre for the press will, however, remain Downtown at the centre of cultural activity in Cairo. We will have a spectacular bookstore on the new campus, which also has a mezzanine area for publishing activities. Thankfully we will be moving out of our current ‘colourful’ building, which isn’t ideal, into the soon-to-be-vacated and renovated ‘palace’ on the original campus. The ground floor will house a completely refurbished AUC bookstore with the AUC Press publishing offices on the floor above.
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