Alexandra Pringle

Editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle is in Mumbai and she’s being mobbed. Not surprising, considering Pringle presides over Bloomsbury, the world’s most glamorous publishing house. “I’d no idea there were so many writers”, Pringle quips, as member after member of the audience at the lit-fest discussion got up to tell tales of publisher woe. Later the array of aspiring authors surrounds Pringle, for tips on getting published in the West.

Two days later, we meet across town, at the Prithvi Theatre in Juhu. Pringle is there to attend readings by Bloomsbury authors like Esther Freud, soon-to-debut Tishani Doshi and Kamila Shamsie. We talk about Bloomsbury. Being at Bloomsbury, the house that is making its fortunes on publishing the amazing Harry Potter must surely be exciting in these Potter struck times. Little surprise then, that Pringle bubbles over with enthusiasm and animation. With a lively repertoire of tiny tales. Like the time she met Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie. “It was at a fiction writing workshop in the States”, she explains.”Kamila’s was the only story in the whole bunch that was any good. So we got talking, and I discovered I had years ago, published her great aunt the Pakistani writer Attiya Husain.” The two kept in touch as Shamsie honed her writing . Today Bloomsbury is publisher for Kamila Shamsie’s novels, with her fourth novel ‘Broken Verses’ due in 2008 .

Alexandra Pringle prides herself on such personal connections, “As an editor you need to share an empathy with your author, especially for fiction. If there isn’t a personal connection it’s not going to work very well”. Bloomsbury is like this, she says. “It’s just the most wonderful company”; she applauds” Everybody at Bloomsbury really cares tremendously about the book”. It’s not always so in publishing and Alexandra is quick to point this out. Having moved to larger corporate publishing house Hamish Hamilton, after a beginning in the young feminist Virago Press, Pringle was put off by the culture .“Everybody was fighting for their own careers”, she complains. So much so that she quit publishing, becoming instead a literary agent, for little under 4 years, till Bloomsbury beckoned. And now it’s at “Bloomsbury till I retire, I hope. There’s nowhere else I want to be “, she confesses.

You’d expect the editor –in-chief of the world’s most record breaking publishing house to be passionate about books. And she is. Like a good publisher she shortlists at first, Bloomsbury authors like young Nigerian Helen Oyeyemi, Donna Tart and Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje’s new book ‘Divisadero’ , the story of a family getting fractured as a result of a passionate love affair, will be launched soon and Pringle sounds entranced. Austen is an old favorite , and Dodie’s ‘I Capture the Castle’ a recent one.

But Alexandra’s also passionate about other things. Like Billie Holliday and Ella Fitzgerald. And her houses. One in the south west of France and the other, her London houseboat.” It’s like a New York loft on the water”, she marvels, ”When you wake up , you hear the ducks and the swans and the water lapping, all this in the middle of London”

Also appropriately enough, she‘s a publisher who’s crazy about India. This is one place she keeps coming back to . The first visit was to Delhi and then to Rajasthan. ”That was it!”, She exclaims , ”I was besotted.” Then there was the trip with author Manil Suri ( The Death of Vishnu), that included a trip to Kerala and Madras. ‘The Age of Shiva’ Suri ‘s second book is forthcoming soon . “It’s stunning. One of the most beautiful and important novels to be set in India in years”, Alexandra raves.

And now there’s another India connection for this very animated, very elegant publisher. Alexandra has a nephew whose moved to Calcuta to work with ‘The Telegraph’. This is not counting her other close association with recently appointed editor-in-chief of Random House, Chiki Sarkar. “Chiki came to me fresh from Oxford”, Alexander reminisces,” and we worked very closely for seven years”. I ask her about Bloomsbury’s India plans, restricted right now to an association with Penguin.” Who knows”, she speculates,” I would love it if something would happen in India. Who knows what’s round the corner?”

This appeared in the Deccan Herald May 2007