What was your pathway to publishing?

In 1971 I founded the weekly newspaper that became Nation Review. Soon afterwards my proprietor, Gordon Barton, acquired Angus & Robertson and offered me the job of running the publishing company. I jumped at the opportunity.

What was the first book you published?

My first acquisition was Dennis Altman’s Homosexual, which had recently been published by a small press in the United States. Three months after publication it was the number two non-fiction bestseller here, ultimately establishing itself as an

On the acknowledgments page of this vast compendium, Christopher Prendergast describes the creation of the work as an ‘arduous task’ and the book itself as an ‘unwieldy vessel’. One can sympathise with the difficulty of presenting as a history of five centuries of French literature what would more accurately be described as a chronological anthology of essays by more than thirty different scholars; but few historians would accept Prendergast’s introductory affirmation that his ‘collection of glimpses, angled and partial snapshots ... is all history can ever be’.

A second introduction, by David Coward, provides a firmer historical context for the essay collection, tracing the development of French cultural distinctiveness across time: the gradual spread of the hegemony of the French language; the rise of the ‘author’ and the ‘intellectual’; and the evolution of readership from a tiny percentage of literate upper-class people to a mass audience. Coward outlines the complexities associated with the arrival of the printing press and the impact of various censorship regimes, and offers a history of literary criticism and an analysis of how French literature today, like any other, faces the challenges of the digital age. He does indeed provide what Prendergast calls ‘the arc of a story centred on the nexus of language, nation and modernity’.

Ashleigh Young is one of a number of writers currently distinguishing themselves as the latest generation to emerge from the creative writing program at Victoria University in Wellington. The course, founded by Bill Manhire in 1975, maintains the supply of excellence that attracted so much resentment as its ‘spectacular babies’ – from Barbara Anderson to Eleanor Catton – carried off the prizes and earned international praise.

Five of the eight categories in this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were taken by VUP authors, among them Hera Lindsay Bird, whose eponymous volume won Best First Book for Poetry. ‘Keats is dead so fuck me from behind,’ sings Bird, a long way from the austere feminist politics of Dinah Hawken in the 1990s. Yet one observation about VUP writers has been that they have made poetry ‘unpoetic’. If Bird confirms this, Young reverses it, making the personal essay a work of resonant literary art. Can You Tolerate This? took both the Ockham non-fiction award and Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize.

Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time.

The idea of hopefulness is central to Lewis’s collection, which has been twenty years in the making. Images of the sacred and the profane, temple and town, host an oscillating meditation on the notion of hope. Sometimes hope is the unclaimed joys of youth, ‘a memory of happiness you couldn’t use’; sometimes hope is cast as an oddly watchful force exerting pressures on human follies and wounds. Lewis’s day job as a nurse is subtly evident in images of the rawness and brutality of the human work of being in the world. Other times, the collection’s voice finds itself in a stand-off with its central preoccupation: ‘What would hope do to me if I couldn’t stare it out?’ The poems’ speakers and characters betray longing for the transcendence that ritual or worship might provide, but this is a book of irreverent religious feeling, not of religion or religiosity. The exchange of forces that religion promises is often sought and found in the act of writing poetry: ‘Between the page and the eye is where the power happens.’