Creator and publisher Ken Wilson-Max reflects on 40 years in the industry

Ken Wilson-Max’s journey to becoming an award-winning author-illustrator and publisher began with a passion for drawing as a young child in Zimbabwe. He studied graphic design as a teenager and found success early on when a magazine cover he created won a silver medal for illustration at the International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno in Czech Republic in 1984. “At the tender age of 19 or so, I was just thinking ‘well, it’s all downhill from here’,” he jokes, adding: “I knew I couldn’t stay in Zimbabwe with that medal. I really wanted to try and do something more.”

This desire saw him enrol at the London College of Printing (now London College of Communication). Through his tutor, he was put in touch with Judith Elliott, the managing director of Orchard Books, where he began working in 1987. He says of Elliott: “She was the first person that opened the professional doors to me.” He describes his time at Orchard and the team he worked with there as his “education”. “I came across people like Francesca Dow, Sarah Odedina, Roy Johnson – a lot of people who went on to do very big things in other companies.”

Wilson-Max himself moved on to roles at BBC Enterprises and David Bennett Books. After Elliott, Bennett became “the second person that really expanded my mind” when he encouraged the young designer to write and illustrate his own books. Noticing a gap in the market for books for boys, Wilson-Max pitched his idea for one to Bennett. “Interestingly, I took the idea to him saying that it was for someone else to illustrate. That was how I saw it. His one question was ‘why don’t you do it?’. And that was it – that changed everything.” Wilson-Max credits Bennett and Bernette Ford, vice-president and editorial director of Scholastic Books US imprint Cartwheel Books, with “completely transforming who I was as far as a new entity into publishing”.

Reflecting on his early days as a published author-illustrator in the 1990s, he recalls: “I didn’t think about the fact that I was the only non-white male around for quite some time. I just focused on making the ideas as strong as possible.” In his own words, “things went off at a pace and for about five or six years I was just non-stop producing books, flying between here and the US”. However, he found the pressure of feeling like he had to “represent the whole of the non-white world…  a lot to try and cope with”. It was Ford who encouraged him to reframe his perspective and “think about where I came from and what I had achieved as someone who comes from another place”.

Wilson-Max’s next career transition happened after he met author and founder of inclusive independent children’s publisher Alanna Books, Anna McQuinn. “We got on really well and then she said she was thinking of moving back to Ireland, and she didn’t know what to do with the company.” The conversation developed into a partnership that saw him become co-owner and publisher of the re-christened Alanna Max in 2018. While still a proud co-owner, he handed over the day-to-day running of the company to Fay Erek in 2021, when he was hired by HarperCollins Children’s Books (HCCB) to set up and run Kumusha Books, its first official imprint to focus on inclusive publishing.

He says of the move: “HarperCollins had this very clear idea of what they wanted to do from an inclusive point of view when I was hired, and I quite liked that.” He shouts out HCCB’s executive publisher at the time, Ann-Janine Murtagh, for championing his appointment and “the idea that the company should be so official with its plans to publish a wider range of voices”. “Kumusha” comes from the Shona language in Zimbabwe and Wilson-Max explains: “It’s a conceptual word that means the idea of home. In HarperCollins terms, it’s a place where people can discuss an idea that perhaps doesn’t fit anywhere else, and then we can try to see how it can take its roots via Kumusha Books. I think that’s so exciting.”

“Kumusha means the idea of home. In HarperCollins terms, it’s a place where people can discuss an idea that perhaps doesn’t fit anywhere else.”

He admits that he took a while to figure out how to approach the list. “We had to firstly define the boundaries for what this imprint might do… It’s a look at a broader readership without excluding the existing readership. When we talk about diversity or inclusive publishing, everyone assumes you’re only going to sell to that group of people, but actually, you should be selling to everybody. That’s how we look at it.” 

Since 2024, Kumusha Books has released six to eight books per year across fiction and non-fiction, spanning from pre-school to chapter books. The launch list received some award recognition and Wilson-Max believes that Kumusha is “settling down nicely”, so he feels “pretty good about its prospects and its future”. He says: “The next stage is to try to aim for success in the way that the bigger commercial and corporate companies want to succeed.” He adds: “I think maybe sometimes in dealing with diversity and inclusion – whatever you want to call all those words – in terms of business, they’ve come to mean ‘small, risky’, and you have to combat that.”

An important aspect of Wilson-Max’s recent work at HarperCollins was taking over from Rose Sandy as head of its relaunched Author and Design Academy, a free six-week course offering training to writers and designers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, this spring. “The alliance with my personal goals and my vision for the future of publishing made it a natural choice.” In terms of his own creativity, he has several books coming out next year, including reissues of his backlist titles with Alanna Max, a second picture book with Walker and the next volume in his series promoting sustainability with his long-standing publisher Otter-Barry Books. Working with the Otter-Barry and Walker teams has “really challenged me to come up with new things and I love that”.

On the subject of challenges, during our discussion Wilson-Max laments the recent closure of children’s indies Knights Of and his former employer Tiny Owl as “big losses to the representative publishing movement”. He expands: “My take on it is that things are always stacked up against you when you talk about inclusive publishing, because it is still quite new.” He continues: “Some days I think there isn’t a strong enough case for a positively sustained, inclusive publishing sector. We have had success and then nothing, and maybe that’s the same as all other genres, but what it’s meant is that it’s not seen as a reliable part of publishing yet. And that’s not to say people aren’t willing it so – I see people really keen to make it work, but the conversation is always a little bit cautious.”

He considers his job as publisher-at-large for Kumusha “to change thinking – not only in the building, but to use what I do there to change thinking in the worldwide publishing industry, where people are at various stages of awareness”. Despite the obstacles, Wilson-Max is positive about the shift he has seen in the industry since he started out. “There has been a change. There are more authors and illustrators from non-white backgrounds in British publishing than at any other time… I know some people have issues with the fact that the pace is really slow, especially from the bigger publishers, but I think they are always protecting their success and it has to be right for them.” He continues: “The main thing I try to promote is the idea that you have to just keep going. You have to be resilient. You have to see it as a marathon… Every kilometre, we’re learning a lot more about what not to do, and then that’s informing what we do.”