| Honouring a champion of French publishing |
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| LBF |
| Written by Liz Thomson |
| Wednesday, 21 April 2010 00:53 |
Antoine Gallimard became the first non-Anglophone publisher to be given the LBF Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing, sponsored by SBS. The award was presented at the Fair yesterday by Stephen Page, CEO of Faber – in many ways Gallimard’s British equivalent. At the helm of the company founded by his grandfather for more than two decades, Gallimard was, said Page, a publisher of "significance and singularity", whose conduct had been "exemplary... a friend to authors, a champion of the French publishing industry and especially of independent publishing and bookselling, a champion of international culture in France and French culture internationally".While honouring Gallimard’s distinguished past – its authors include Proust, Camus, Malraux, Sartre, Joyce, Faulkner – he has created a no less distinguished present (Roth, Bellow, McEwan, Kundera and Pamuk), developing the company "with vigour and seriousness", combining "active publishing of the back catalogue and literary list with contemporary excellence in more directly commercial fields". But more than that, Page concluded, the award celebrated Gallimard himself, "as a publisher, his principles, his actions, his solutions to difficulty, his willingness to adapt, his devotion to independence of mind... Antoine has figured this business out for more than twenty years and continues to do so." |
