Europa Editions was founded in 2005 by Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, owners of the Italian publishing house Edizioni E/O. The primary aim of Europa Editions was to bring high-quality international literature, especially works in translation, to English-speaking audiences. The imprint was launched in the U.S. and expanded to the U.K. in 2011, operating as Europa Editions UK from London. Michael Reynolds, the executive publisher based in New York, discussed the company’s success as it now celebrates its 20th anniversary. He spoke to John Maher.
What makes Europa stand out from the translated publishing pack?
From the start, we’ve aimed at a more general audience, not so much niche translation aficionados. This idea of publishing with a broader audience in mind—the same that Riverhead, Knopf, Doubleday, and Atria are after—has been interesting. Our big books, and there have been a lot over the years, constitute our quiet achievement.
That’s evident, at least in hindsight, from your first book: Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. What are some other quiet achievements?
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé, the Christelle Dabos books, and Valérie Perrin—these are all 200,000-, 300,000-, 400,000-copy-selling books, and Hedgehog is up near a million. That doesn’t happen very often with translation in this market.
What’s another way the press has helped shape the business over the past two decades?
Years ago, a friend of mine was opening up a headhunting business in the publishing industry and told me, as they were developing their questionnaire for candidates, they had 20 questions. She told me that one of these questions was: what contribution do you think Europa Editions has made to the American book market? I was like, I’m not sure, maybe the work in translation? Wrong! At the time, she said, the fact that we were publishing these trade paperback originals, a sort of vintage idea, was the real contribution.
What’s a space you’re looking to branch into in your next 20 years?
One thing we’ve been trying hard to do is work a little more in non-fiction. It became clear a few years ago that the number of fiction titles published in translation was growing, while the number of works of non-fiction in translation were shrinking. It was pretty easy to assume that the attitude of publishing toward books originating in another language was: “Storytelling is fine for those foreigners, but when it comes to facts, we’ve got our own authors to deal with.” I though that sort of a dangerous idea, an isolationist idea, and also wrong because there’s so much great work in the non-fiction space happening in other languages.
What are some concerns you have at present in the translation market?
I see the situation for work in translation changing in the future thanks to machine translation. Some online retailers may bypass publishers altogether in the future, allowing for things like instant translation of books that are available abroad for audiences that are already developed in other ways, through their community of fantasy readers, or genre fiction readers, or romantasy readers, or whatever. They’ll already know about, say, something great that’s happening in Germany, and I don’t think it’s going to take too long before someone figures out, well: “It may not be a great literary translation, but if you really want to read it, just push here.”
