A home of Nobel literary laureates

When Jacques Testard started his own publishing company in 2014, he wanted a name that suggested a crazy endeavour. Testard called the imprint Fitzcarraldo Editions, a reference to the 1982 Werner Herzog movie in which a rubber baron tries to haul a 320-ton steamboat over a hill in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

“It was not a very subtle metaphor on the stupidity of setting up a publishing house,” Testard, 37, recalled recently. Publishing often “feels like you’re just digging a hole in the ground and chucking money into it,” he added.

Eight years later, Fitzcarraldo Editions seems far from a madman’s folly. It is one of Britain’s most talked-about publishing houses, with a reputation as the English-language imprint of choice for Nobel laureates. When French writer Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 literature prize October 6, she became Fitzcarraldo’s third author to gain the honor since the house’s founding, after Olga Tokarczuk, of Poland, in 2019, and Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and writer, in 2015. Fitzcarraldo Editions is also the British publisher for Jon Fosse, a Norwegian author and playwright, who is regularly among bookmakers’ favorites for the award. (It has also published one book by Elfriede Jelinek, although she received the Nobel in 2004, a decade before Fitzcarraldo began.)

And Fitzcarraldo is making waves outside the Nobel. Since 2017, a dozen of the house’s books, including Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season” and Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory,” have been nominated for the International Booker Prize, one of the highest-profile awards for translated fiction. In 2018, Tokarczuk’s “Flights” won that one, too.

The day after the Ernaux announcement, Testard said that he had ordered the reprinting of 65,000 copies of her books to keep pace with demand, a huge number for Fitzcarraldo, given that it sold around 135,000 books across all its titles in 2021.

Sitting in the company’s one-room office in South London on October 7, Testard said he would think it “very silly” if people called Fitzcarraldo the home of the Nobel. “It’s not like we have a strategy to try and win,” he said. His taste just happened to align with “a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people” who decide the Nobel each year, he added.

Yet, British literary insiders say the imprint’s success cannot be explained by luck alone. Paul Keegan, a former editor at Penguin Classics who gave Testard his first publishing job in 2012 at an imprint called Notting Hill Editions, said much of the British publishing industry was “baffled” by Fitzcarraldo’s success. But, Keegan noted, the fact that Testard reads fiction in French and Spanish, as well as in English, made him able to spot authors whom other editors in Britain’s “monoglot, insular” publishing world might miss.

Testard, born in France but educated in England and Ireland, said he had taken a roundabout route to publishing. As a student at Oxford University, he was on track to study for a doctorate in history until he sat through a seminar on “the memorial bells and fountains of Oxfordshire from 1847 to 1857” and realized he needed to change path. “It felt a bit futile,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times