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UK and US publishers are failing to put their money where their morals are with the IPA’s Prix Voltaire.
From President Trump’s attempts to ban several books on his presidency, to HarperCollins’ steadfast defence of Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, which earned it The Bookseller’s inaugural Freedom to Publish Prize at this year’s British Book Awards, the question of the freedom to publish is never far away. So it is a shame, then, that UK and US publishers are thin on the ground when it comes to sponsorship of the International Publishing Association’s (IPA) Prix Voltaire—its freedom to publish prize.
The prize’s backers are overwhelmingly from northern Europe. With the exception of Penguin Random House, all the sponsors are currently from Germany, Norway and Sweden: respectively Bonnier Media Deutschland, Hotzbrinck and Verlag C H Beck (all from Germany); Samlaget (Norway); and Albert Bonniers Forlag and Norstedts (both Sweden).
Last year Scandinavia and northern Europe dominated again, with Natur & Kultur (Sweden), Ascheehoug (Norway), Norstedts (Sweden), Albert Bonniers (Sweden) and Samlaget (Norway) appearing on the sponsor page.
Where are the big UK houses? Where is Bloomsbury, which has just posted its best ever results and has just seen Myanmar publisher Lwin Oo Sarpay closed by the junta for distributing Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History, and Hate Speech by Ronan Lee, published by Bloomsbury’s I B Tauris imprint?
Where is HarperCollins UK, whose courageous—and successful—support of Putin’s People was widely admired? Where are the Americans who had all those battles with Trump over publication of book after book and for whom the First Amendment is so important? Admittedly, Henry Holt, which published Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, is owned by Holtzbrink, but where is Simon & Schuster, which faced Trump’s legal rage in 2018 over Unhinged by his aide Omarosa Manigault?
Where are the French publishers, for whom the word liberty is so cherished and which the Charlie Hebdo tragedy highlighted? There has only been one year, 2017, when a French publisher (Les Editions du Seuill) supported the prize.
Where is the Publishers Association of China—yes, you read that correctly—which, after all, is a member of the IPA and must ostensibly support its key pillars, the freedom to publish and the protection of copyright, the freedom to publish in their case perhaps, as it sees fit, without the West’s interference.
Ditto the Arab World. No publisher from this vast region has ever supported the prize in its 17-year history. Nor has Hachette or one of its companies. In 2019 Norwegian and Swedish names once again dominated, with the addition of Germany’s Holtzbrinck, the Borsenverien (the German booksellers and publishers association); Random House Germany and Bonnier Germany (though of course the latter’s parent is Swedish). No one could ever accuse Germany of ignoring the freedom to publish.
Involvement by the wider publishing community has fallen away while the problem of freedom to publish has not. This seems a shame, given that the IPA has just celebrated its 125th anniversary.
Where is the rest of the world? As Richard Charkin commented when he became IPA president in 2015: “The tragic events in Paris earlier this month [when 17 people were killed in an attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices] demonstrate just how fragile the notion of freedom of speech is and how important it is that we all stand together when it is attacked.”
But are publishers standing together? It was something of a golden year in 2016 for sponsorship of the prize, with contributions from Elsevier, HarperCollins, Kodansha (Japan), OUP, PRH, Simon & Schuster and Springer Nature. Charkin, a well-known international figure, must surely have helped bring in some of these names, just as his vice-president Michel Kolman of Elsevier must have helped bring in his own house.
Since then, involvement by the wider publishing community has fallen away, while the problem of freedom to publish has not. This seems a shame, given that the IPA has just celebrated its 125th anniversary.
It is easy to understand why a Chinese publisher might not want to be involved. The award was given to the Hong Kong/Swedish publisher and bookseller Guin Minhai in 2017 and being seen to support such a winner might lead to problems. But the Publishers Association of China has no representation on the nine-strong Freedom to Publish committee. It has no part in selecting winners. But it is a member of the body—the IPA—that runs the award, and that is to be celebrated.
It’s worth noting too that not every decision made by the IPA is supported by all its members. Abstentions are common if signing an agreement can lead to problems in the member’s home country. There are times when the IPA can say things that an individual member cannot. There are times when an IPA statement might put a member or member representative at risk, and the organisation refrains from doing so. There are also times when the IPA issues statements that conflict with a member position. It steers a difficult course with considerable skill.
There are encouraging inconsistences. Presumably the Saudi Publishers Association (SPA) did not support giving the Prix Voltaire to the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi in 2016, and yet it went ahead and the SPA was a member of the IPA, so that is to be celebrated too.
One should remember that two winners honoured by the award have lost their lives defending the freedom to publish. Bangladeshi publisher Faisal Arefin Depan was assassinated in 2015 and Lebanon’s Lokman Slim, co-founder of Dar Al Jadeed publishing house, lost his life in 2021.
Finally, why no contribution from any literary agency for whom the freedom to publish is, needless to say, vital for its clients? The sums are modest. The prize currently carries a purse of CHF 10,000 (around £8,150). The United Talent Agency, which has just extended its global footprint with its acquisition of Curtis Brown Group, would be an obvious place to start.