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Lady with the Potter wand
Liz Calder, 67, the publishing director of Bloomsbury says the next great writer to equal J.K. Rowling’s success can well be found in India. "Another Rowling may be sitting in some cafe in College Street (in north Kolkata)," says Calder who picked up J.K. Rowling after the first ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript met with rejection in other places. "The last and the seventh ‘Harry Potter’ book from Rowling would hit the bookstores in 2007 because that was what Rowling had said from the beginning. I do not rule out an Indian emerging successfully on
the international scene," says Liz who lived over her family’s
grocery in Edgware (the UK) until she was 11, when years of
globe-trotting began.. She later became a successful fashion model in
Brazil before returning to England and getting into publishing. In the
process, she became the co-founder of Bloomsbury which eventually met
with what fellow publisher Philip Gwyn-Jones calls the "greatest
slice of luck to hit any publisher in the last 100 years." After
a visit with husband Louis Baum to the congested book bazaar of College
Street in north Kolkata, the academic hub of the city, Liz asks "We
can publish any writer irrespective of the place where they come from.
Indian writing is extremely good. People do send their work to us from
India. We have published a few Indian writers recently. They are all
original manuscripts,’ says Liz, whose house first published Salman
Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight’s Children.
"I like Vikram Seth, Manil Suri, Amitav Ghosh. I like Arundhati
Roy who I think wrote a wonderful book (The God of Small Things),"
she says. In 2000, she married her long-time companion Louis Baum. Liz
had romantic fairy tale ideas of love and marriage and trailed her
husband wherever he went till she read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963), and felt a "great wave of relief to discover
that what I was feeling was being felt by millions of women. It changed
my life." It was obviously her association with Rowling that
brought Bloomsbury to international limelight. Liz says her association
with Rowling began rather routinely. "Just the usual way, an agent
sent the manuscript which was turned down by some other houses. The
children’s editors loved it and we published it. No, nobody imagined
that it would be such a big success." Potter fans now know that
Rowling would write only one more book in the series and no more.
"One more ‘Harry Potter’ only but Rowling said from the
beginning that she would write seven. She would write other books for
us," says Liz. What was the magic behind Potter-mania? "The
success of ‘Harry Potter’ was through word of mouth. I think it was
also the time when children perhaps realised that reading a book can be
exciting or more exciting than watching television." "Rowling
filled a very important blank space at the right time and with lots of
freshness and originality. She wrote something that could tear an entire
generation away from the TV. It had the right blend of magic, a school
story, good versus evil and humour." But how does Liz strike a
balance between content and money? "Actually the job of a publisher
is a tough one as it calls for balancing between aesthetics and balance
sheets. The editors consult the marketing and salespeople and everybody
contribute in the evaluation of the book. We depend on the instincts of
the editors,’ she says. What about possible disgrace and legal
trouble from new writers in the wake of the Kaavya Viswanathan episode.
"We have always published writers who we thought were original
writers. The books that have been successful are ones which people got
excited about," says Calder. "To publish something just
because something is successful, like may be Bridget Jones’s Diary,
is not wise. The only way to publish successfully is to go ahead
with what you believe in," says Liz whose judgment has made her a
key figure in momentous changes in British publishing since the early
1970s, reflecting feminism and the internationalisation of literary
fiction.— TWF
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