Portrait of a PUBLISHER ON FIRE

Founder of Seagull Books, Naveen Kishore, reflects on building a global audience and what keeps him in the game. Aindrisha Mitra listens in

- Aindrisha Mitra

‘All the world’s a stage…’ This Shakespearean wisdom finds a parallel in Naveen Kishore’s quest for his grail as an Indian publisher seeking and acquiring world rights for transborder literature. That his background in Theatre and the Performing arts may have been a happy coincidence is another thing but when Kishore decided to pursue a career in books, plot twists seemed inevitable and very much a part of the course. Over three decades ago, when Kishore founded Seagull Books — an independent publishing house based out of Calcutta, it was hard to challenge the status quo owing to the laws of the land, post-independence. In 2005, Seagull Books London Limited, the publisher’s international wing, took a decisive leap as it began to acquire rights for world literature to be published in English and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “If nothing, it created a level playing field, which meant we had similar parity as the publishers based out of the UK or the US,” Kishore shares.

BUILDING SUSTAINABILITY

What started as an English translation program for plays, film scripts and making alternative content across languages accessible grew into an expanding corpus of academic and cultural texts.