Książkowe Klimaty, a publishing house based in the Polish city of Wrocław, has been gradually carving out its distinct and variegated literary footprint since its founding in 2013. In accordance to their mission statement, which states a passion for presenting what is “close and unknown at the same time”, Książkowe Klimaty has continually serviced Polish readers with a rich variety of contemporary European texts, publishing translations from the Czech, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, and more. In the following interview, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, speaks with Książkowe Klimaty’s founder, Tomasz Zaród, on the house’s incidental founding, the award-winning titles available, and the house’s southward expansion.
Julia Sherwood (JS): Poland has no shortage of publishing houses. Many of them also publish translated literature but, as far as I know, yours is the only one that focuses solely, or almost solely, on translations. How and when did it all start?
Tomasz Zaród (TZ): You are right, most of the books published by Książkowe Klimaty are translations, although we have also published some by Polish writers. It all started by chance. A friend of mine with a small publishing house had acquired the rights to a few works, including a novel by the Slovak writer Pavol Rankov, Stalo sa prvého septembra (alebo inokedy), which we translated as Zdarzyło się pierwszego września (albo kiedy indziej, and which can also be found in English translation as It Happened on the First of September (or some other time). I had an online bookstore with well-developed logistics, so we decided to join forces. This was in 2013, and when my friend left after a year, I was left with a publishing house. I had no previous experience in this field but had learned a great deal during that first year. And I was very lucky to have a great team. There were three of us at the start: one in charge of editorial matters (finding translators, editors, copyeditors, etc.), another dealing with promotion, while I tried to tie everything together in Excel. None of us were very experienced, but maybe that is why we dared to do things people with more experience might not have done! Right now, the permanent staff consists of two people responsible for commissioning, promotion, and sales, while I handle the business side of things. All the other work (editing, copyediting, typesetting, and graphic design) is done by freelancers. Looking back on the eight years since we began, I believe that the gamble has paid off: we have published more than ninety books translated from well over a dozen languages.
JS: The literal translation of the name of your publishing house—Książkowe klimaty—is “Book or literary atmospheres”, which doesn’t sound so good in English, but your mission becomes clear from the explanation on your website, which says that every series you publish aims to convey the unique atmosphere of a country or a region. What are the criteria you use to select the countries and books that you publish?
TZ: Most of the books we have published come from Central and Southern Europe, in the widest sense. These are countries not that far from Poland—places where we spend our holidays or that we visit at weekends, but at the same time, we know nothing about the great literature written there. We started with Slovak and Czech, then moved on to Greek and then Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and then further south. We try to select books that are critically acclaimed and have won some awards. Ten of the books we have published have received the European Union Prize for Literature, many are recipients of prestigious local awards, such as the Magnesia Litera in the Czech Republic and Anasoft Litera in Slovakia. Another feature of the books we publish is that they break stereotypes and show the relations between communities. For example, It Happened on the First of September features the multi-ethnic mix in southern Slovakia, while Księga szeptów (Cartea soaptelor / The Book of Whispers) by Varujan Vosganian deals with the history of Armenians in Romania. Imaret. W cieniu zegara (Imaret: Three Gods, One City) by Iannis Kalpouzos deals with Greek-Turkish relations, while Bulgarian-Turkish relations are the subject of Requiem dla nikogo (Requiem for Nobody) by Zlatko Enev, translated by Hanna Karpinska. We also rely on suggestions from our translators.
JS: Which of the books you’ve published have met with greatest critical acclaim and which ones have proved most popular with the readers in Poland?
TZ: Two of our books—Pavol Rankov’s It Happened . . . and The Book of Whispers by the Romanian writer Varujan Vosganian received the Angelus Central European Literature Award. These are also our publishing house’s best-selling books. Then there is Weronika Gogola, who translated three books for us from the Slovak: Carpathia (Carpathia) and Informacja (Informácia / Information) by Maroš Krajňak, and Uchom ihly (Przez ucho igielne / Through the Eye of the Needle) by Ján Púček. And then, in 2017, we published Gogola’s first own book, the novel Po trochu (Little By Little). It won the Conrad Prize for best literary debut a year later and has since been translated into Czech and Slovak.
JS: Which book or author is your personal favourite?
TZ: It’s hard to pick a favourite writer, especially as I have become friends with many of them. But perhaps my favourite book is Pavol Rankov‘s It Happened . . . Maybe because it was our first publication, or because it was the first of ours to receive the Angelus Prize, or perhaps simply because it’s a wonderful novel. It is set on the Slovak-Hungarian border and the action takes place on the first day of September in the years from 1938 to 1968, i.e. starting with the day of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and leading up to the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968. The twists and turns of the protagonists’ lives take place against the backdrop of the tumultuous historical events over those thirty years.
JS: Do you have a core group of translators that you work with?
TZ: When we publish several books by the same author, they usually have the same translator. Some translators do only one book, others are regular collaborators. For example, Tomasz Grabiński has translated all of Pavol Rankov’s books from the Slovak, while his wife Katarzyna Dudzic-Grabińska is the translator from the Czech of everything we have published by Jaroslav Rudiš. Hanna Karpińska has translated three Bulgarian books for us. And if I may blow my own trumpet a little: three years ago, Książkowe Klimaty received the St. Jerome Prize (Lew Hieronima), awarded by the Polish Association of Translators, to publishers who have the best collaboration with translators.
JS: You have recently expanded further south, to the Balkans and even beyond. What prompted this decision and what other countries have you added, or are thinking of adding, to the mix?
TZ: The decision to move south stems from my fascination with Greece. I love Greece and was very keen to introduce our readers to contemporary Greek literature. It is almost completely unknown in Poland and we may be the only publishers in this country who have published contemporary Greek authors. Although, in fact, our first Greek book was one written in the 1930s—Kronika pewnego miasta (trans. Janusz Strasburger, The Tale of a Town) by Pandelis Prevelakis. We have also published works by Lena Kitsopoulou, Amanda Michalopulou, Kostas Akrivos, and Emilios Solomou, among others. And once we included Greece, we moved on to its neighbours—the Balkans on one side, Turkey on the other. Of the four books published in our Turkish series, the one I would like to highlight is Turcja. Obłęd i melancholia (Turkey: the Insane and the Melancholy), by the veteran Turkish journalist and columnist Ece Temerkulan, translated into Polish by Łukasz Buchalski. The author received the annual 2017 “Ambassador of New Europe” prize (awarded by the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk and the Jan Nowak Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław) for the most innovative book on a European theme published in Poland in the previous year. The book was praised for relating “the history of a state that has ended up in hell, a history that is depressing and amusing at the same time, and one that shows the readers what they don’t see on the news, in newspapers and political analyses: the Turkish soul.” However, I will probably not expand any further south. I would like to focus on writing from countries closer to Poland, ones we have already covered: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania. We did contemplate publishing books from Ukraine and the Baltic countries for a while, but we felt it was going too far. For the time being, at least.
JS: You have made some exceptions though. One example is a book by the Kurdish-Iranian writer and journalist Behrous Boochani that relates his experience in an Australian-run detention camp on the island of Manus in Papua New Guinea. What made you expand your geographical horizons this far?
TZ: I felt that these notes—that Boochani wrote and sent out illegally as a series of messages on a mobile phone from the detention camp where he was held as a refugee—made a simply exceptional book. It appeared in English as No Friends But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison and last year we published it in Tomasz S. Gałązka’s Polish translation as Tylko góry będą ci przyjaciółmi, jointly with ArtRage, an online e-book and print book platform. A premium edition (hardback, with a dust jacket and high-quality paper) sold over five hundred copies on ArtRage, while the paperback edition has gone into general distribution. Iran, where Behrous Boochani comes from, is not that far from “our” countries—in fact, a few years earlier we published a book by another Iranian writer, Goli Taraghi, Sen zimowy (Winter Sleep), translated into Polish by Dorota Słapa.
JS: You sell your books mainly through your own internet bookstore, Kraina Książek (Bookland). Are they also available in regular bookshops?
TZ: Kraina Książek is one of the first online bookstores in Poland. Founded in 1997, it now serves primarily as a platform for selling books in other languages: English, German, and Czech, for example. Or in any other language, for that matter: there are several million titles to choose from. But of course, we also sell books in Polish, including those published by Książkowe Klimaty. But this is not our main outlet: our books are also in normal distribution and available in brick-and-mortar bookstores as well as online. However, our favourite method of selling books is at county fairs and on market days, where we have direct contact with our readers. In Poland we have a tradition of these fairs, with several of them being held each year across the country, involving book presentations and signings by the authors. The largest markets, like the ones in Warsaw, Kraków, and Wrocław, attract tens of thousands of visitors.
JS: 2020 was an extremely challenging year for the book trade worldwide. How did it affect your publishing house? Have you seen a spurt in the sales of e-books because of the pandemic? How popular are they in Poland, compared to printed books?
TZ: Because of the pandemic, virtually all public events have been cancelled, so book sales in bookshops and at fairs plummeted to almost nothing. However, sales through other channels have soared, as people haven’t been able to go to the cinema or to concerts and have turned to buying books, including from our online bookstore. And sales of e-books have grown by several dozen per cent during the pandemic—they are becoming increasingly popular, although it will be a long time before they catch up with printed books.
JS: You are about to launch Terra Librorum, a new English-language, London-based publishing house. What made you embark on this new venture and will its profile and editorial policy be similar to that of your Polish publishing house?
TZ: I see it as something of a challenge. I am convinced that a publishing house with a profile similar to that of Książkowe Klimaty can succeed in the UK, too. It’s not going to be a carbon copy, of course, but there will certainly be many similarities.
JS: What are the first books you will publish under the Terra Librorum imprint? When are they coming out, and what are you planning next?
TZ: We are planning to launch in the late autumn of 2021 with two books by Polish authors. The first, translated by Scotia Gilroy, is Doctor Bianco and Other Stories (Doktor Bianko i inne opowiadania), a collection by Maciek Bielawski, which Olga Tokarczuk described as “brilliant little insights into everyday reality”, and I believe that these stories are so universal that they could just as easily take place in London as in Wrocław. It is Bielawski’s second book; his third is coming out next year. Our second title will be Mapa (The Map) by Barbara Sadurska, in a translation by Kate Webster. This collection of stories linked by the motif of a fifteenth-century map is regarded as one of the best debuts in Poland over the past few years and has received the Gombrowicz Prize. Our third English title will be But on the Other Hand (Na druhej strane), a collection of stories by Pavol Rankov, translated from the Slovak by Magdalena Mullek. There are several more in the works.
JS: I’m particularly happy to see a Slovak author among your first books as there is still a dearth of English translations of Slovak literature. But I also look forward to your other titles and wish you the best of luck with your new venture.
TZ: Thank you, we will need it!
Tomasz Zaród graduated in computer science from the Wroclaw Polytechnic and then studied marketing at the Economic Academy in Wroclaw, but hasn’t written a computer programme for 20 years. In 1996 he founded Kraina Książek – one of the first online bookshops in Poland – and in 2013 he co-founded the publishing house Książkowe Klimaty. He is an afficionado of mountains, Greece, and London.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German and Russian. She is based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
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