How to win four Nobel Prizes in literature

00:00 07:40

Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial hair. ‘Thanks for making the time.’ I explain, apologetically but cheerily, that I’m going to be asking him to give his basic ‘how I keep winning Nobel Prizes’ spiel – at which, I say, he’s probably by now well practised. ‘Hm,’ he says, ‘I’m not sure about that. I’ll do my best.’

Though he’s grateful for what it’s done for his tiny publishing company, you sense that Jacques Testard probably finds it a bit irksome that it takes the ephemeral showbiz razzle of the Swedish academy to bring the experimental writing he publishes anything much in the way of public attention.

But there again, the Nobel thing is hard to ignore. The tiny highbrow press that Testard started less than ten years ago with a £70,000 loan (enough, he says he calculated at the time, to publish ten books and keep him alive for two years) now has seven employees. Over that decade no fewer than four of its authors have copped the Nobel: Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and now Jon Fosse (‘John Foss,’ I say; ‘Yon Fosser,’ Testard says without expressly correcting me).

‘I remind every author that we publish, whenever they make it on to the list of a prize, that prizes are terrible,’ he says, ‘unless you win. I think that’s quite a useful way to think about them. For us, obviously, prizes have been huge and the Nobel Prizes especially transformative in terms of booksellers and visibility, but also in terms of giving a boost not just to the authors who have won them, but to the rest of the list. I think, at least compared to prize culture in France, we’re not corrupt.