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 Christopher MacLehose to launch Open Borders Press at Orenda Books 

 Karen Sullivan, Publisher of Orenda Books, is delighted to announce that Christopher MacLehose will be leading Orenda’s first-ever imprint. 

MacLehose, whose Mountain Leopard Press list was sold by Welbeck to Hachette in December 2022, will now publish Open Borders Press as an associate list of Orenda Books. Orenda and the new imprint have much in common, sharing a culture and approach, and MacLehose says that Open Borders Press is grateful to be able to take advantage of Orenda’s dynamic and responsive operation. 

Having commissioned translations from thirty-seven languages during his years as a publisher, MacLehose will continue to look for authors of exceptional quality from all over the world. 

The list will endeavour to match the success of the Harvill Press and MacLehose Press models in publishing the best literary fiction and non-fiction, much of it in translation, as well as crime fiction (exclusively in translation) written by outstanding storytellers. The quality of the translations and of every aspect of the design of the books will be paramount. 

Koukla MacLehose, who founded the celebrated scouting agency that bore her name, will work with the Press. 

The first title under the new imprint, Andrey Kurkov’s Our Daily War, a sequel to the international bestselling Diary of an Invasion – a deeply personal account of the continuing war in Ukraine – will be published in the summer. 

Karen Sullivan says, ‘I have long admired Christopher, both for the energy and ingenuity he brings to the industry, but also for his unerring eye, his profound and purposeful support of literature in translation, and his uncanny ability to seek out literary gems. It is an honour and a joy to work closely with him, and his publishing vision for Open Borders Press very much reflects Orenda’s ethos and complements our output. 

‘As we approach our tenth anniversary, it feels like the right time to embrace this opportunity, and we are looking forward to what is bound to be an indomitable partnership. OBP’s first published title, Andrey Kurkov’s Our Daily War, is a powerful, insightful and unexpectedly humorous book, and being involved in publishing Ukraine’s finest writer is an absolute privilege.’ 

You can reach Christopher MacLehose on Christopher@maclehose.net or +44 7711 696098 

Andrey Kurkov’s Our Daily War will be published in hardback in July 2024. 

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People-Watching for a Living – The Inspiration for Dead Sweet

For the majority of my adult life I have worked in politics and served four terms as an elected member of parliament – with one term as a minister. I found that I tapped into knowledge that has been compounded over a long period of time – an understanding of budgets, the law-making process, and the main topics of public debate. 

Be sure, however, that I gave myself permission to fictionalise events and settings. Some of these were based on ´what if´ scenarios – something had been done that was in reality debated but not realised, for example. I deliberately stayed well away from parliament itself because I had so recently left politics when I wrote the book. I wasn’t ready to go deep into that world in Dead Sweet, but who knows what the future will bring! But what I could use – and did – was what I learned about people.

One of the privileges of having been in politics for this long is how well you get to know society and all of its different aspects. Every day you wake up and hear and read about issues that are affecting the people we serve. And then there were all the people we met – the hundreds, thousands of people, with their stories and their individual concerns, and the dynamics they create in various situations. I watched the people around me – everywhere – to see what was worrying them or bringing them joy; I watched them closely in meetings and in social gatherings. It was my job to understand them in order to do my job.

I started writing based on my interest in people and especially the dynamics of different relationships. Sometimes we ask ourselves if it is possible for someone to be born bad and also what makes even the best of us do the unthinkable. I wondered what a smart psychopath could be doing in the surroundings that I live in – how far could he go and if, and then whom, would be able to stop him (or her!). 

I started to create the characters who then ended up in Dead Sweet. I imagined them walking into a room, considering how the energy would shift in their presence, how their voices would sound and how others would react to them. Slowly the story started to come alive. When my government official, Óttar, became more defined, I chose to make him a high-ranking official because I know that environment well. I know the set-up, the dynamics, and what happens on a day-to-day basis. 

 As the writing progressed I found the need to explore and write more about the relationships and interactions between my characters, between Sigurdís and her family, between brother and sister, mother and son, Sigurdís and her boss – because no relationship is the same and relationships are never  black and white. There are layers of the past defining every relationship – a shared past between the people involved and also their own individual experiences. And often the most important things you find is in what is ´not´ said but shown in body language and what ´lies in the air´. 

I am often asked if Óttar is based on someone I met during my political years. The answer is simply no, because most of the people I worked with were genuinely trying to do their honest best every day. That’s why I found it fascinating to place him there to see what he could get away with. People do the best and worst things.

Katrín Júlíusdóttir’s Dead Sweet, translated by Quentin Bates, is out today in beautiful hardback.

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Where the inspiration comes from…

Hailed as the ‘most original crime writer in Britain’ and widely compared to Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, Will Carver’s imagination knows no bounds. Here’s what inspires him … and, of course, his darkly funny, twisty new thriller Upstairs at the Beresford. 

You hear about these people who knew from birth that they wanted to be an author. 

Not me. 

Sure, I secretly wrote poetry through my teenage years. I still do. But my love was with film. I watched EVERYTHING. 

I still do. 

Then I found theatre. I loved Shakespeare. I read anything by Brecht. And Berkoff. And all that Kitchen Sink stuff. For me, nobody wrote dialogue like David Mamet. That’s still the case – even though Aaron Sorkin clearly has a gift for it. 

I thought that maybe I would become a playwright. 

And, somewhere inside, I still do.

I was reading Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding and Mike Gayle when I went to university. I thought I might fit in well with that ‘lad lit’ crowd. But I had never really thought about writing a book. I didn’t have a writer out there who was producing novels that made me think that it was the medium for me. 

But that changed when I read Fight Club.

I had no idea that you were even allowed to write a book like that and it opened up an entirely new world for me. I think it’s a book that catalysed many writers to action. 

Choke clearly had an influence on the support group idea for Psychopaths Anonymous, though I wouldn’t come up with that idea for another twenty years. The opening of that book also has a very similar feel to the opening of Hinton Hollow Death Trip, where the narrator is talking directly to the reader and telling them not to even bother reading the story. 

Chuck Palahniuk has, of course, been a huge influence on me. And it must be able to be seen in my writing because I do get compared to him … frequently. And I’m, obviously, okay with that. It’s not that I’m trying to copy his style, it’s just that his books let me know that writing can have style. 

Hemingway was the first writer that I devoured. By that, I mean that I read one book and then read only him until I had consumed everything he had written. First was A Moveable Feast. This was a fascinating glimpse into that time in history where many writers and artists were living and creating in Paris. I moved on to The Old Man and the Sea, which isn’t even a hundred pages but so much happens. 

This really affected me. The prose was so sparse. There were no drawn-out descriptions. Somehow, he could write, ‘The room was dark and cold’ and I felt like I knew exactly what that room looked like. 

When I write things like this post, I can get stuck in waffle, but when I write my fiction, I like to keep it laconic. Every word has to count. No fluff. No bluster. Short sentences. Short chapters. Make the point. Paint the picture enough that the reader fills in the gaps. 

Hemingway said something like, ‘The beauty in the movement of an iceberg is that two thirds are underneath the water.’ It’s a beautiful way to describe his style of writing and something that I always consider in my own. This is certainly something I do when I create vignettes of my characters.

My third and final influence is Charles Bukowski. I’m such a cliché, right? Angry, young(ish) man likes Palahniuk and Bukowski. Shocker! Well, yes, they do tend to go hand-in-hand. And maybe I could have put Hunter S. Thompson in there to make the biggest hackneyed statement but his work didn’t really affect me in the same way. 

I did with Bukowski what I had done with Hemingway. I read Post Office and completely fell in love. Then I read all he had written. His writing is so raw and dirty. No punches are pulled. I like that. It feels like the lightest of edits has been performed in order to maintain the writer’s voice. 

And what a voice. 

Bukowski was also a fantastic poet but his poetry, like his prose, is unflinching in its simplicity. Much like Hemingway, he doesn’t try to complicate things. One of my favourite things that he ever said was that ‘An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.’ 

That’s what he did. I think it’s all he knew how to do. As a writer, I try to tackle some tough subjects in my books but put them across in a way that they can be thought about and understood. Bukowski is always in mind when I’m doing this. 

So, these are the three biggest influences on the way I write and the things that I read. There are, of course, writers that are fantastic at creating characters or setting scenes or crafting a plot but when it comes to the actual art of putting words on a page, Palahniuk, Hemingway and Bukowski are my go-to guys.

There is a truthfulness to the writing that binds them.

Raw. Sparse. Stylish. And honest. With an added ‘fuck you’. 

Upstairs at the Beresford, by Will Carver, is out today.