I was lucky enough to meet Nicola Hill, marketing director for the Penguin Press in the UK, recently. Nicola looks after the wonderful books that come out of the Penguin Classic and Allen Lane lists. Part of the challenge for publishers these digital days is to reinforce the idea of the book as a beautiful and interesting object and Penguin with their rich backlist have a lot to work with. You may have seen on our shelves the Little Black Classics that range in price from $1.99 to $4.99. Snippets of larger works, the series took out a major award at the recent British Book Industry Awards. While some might object to treating books as commodities, I think it’s an exciting way to engender interest in their contents.

Most English publishers I meet are impressed by the vibrancy of bookselling in Australia; in the UK bookselling has been dire, most independents have gone out business, Borders and most other chains except for Waterstones have gone out of business, but even Waterstones had almost been brought to its knees at one point. Nicola wanted to talk about this as well as other things. It was interesting to hear about the books she was publishing that she was most excited about and her favourite, then at least, was Madonna in a Fur Coat by Turkish writer Sabahattin Ali which was coming out as a Penguin Classic. Originally published in 1943, it made no impression then but was reprinted years ago and has been on top of the Turkish bestseller lists ever since. It tells the story of a shy young man who’s sent to Berlin by his father just after the First World War to learn German and the soap business. He’s greeted warmly as a Turk and a German ally by the failed military and colonials in his pensione but finds them tedious; he’s more attracted to the bohemian side of the budding Weimar republic and meets a young woman in nightclub who offers the promise of liberation. It’s a beautiful and compelling little book and refreshing to think that it came out of quite a repressive time. Sabahattin Ali, by the way, was murdered at the Bulgarian border, allegedly by an agent of the Turkish Secret Police.

The beleaguered Prime Minister’s Literary Awards took another hammering last month when it was revealed that in 2013 the nonfiction judges’ choice for the winner, The Sex Lives of Australians by Frank Bongiorno, was overruled by then PM Kevin Rudd in favour of Ross McMullin’s Farewell, Dear People. If it wasn’t for the prize pool of $680,000 (the largest in Australia) they’d be a bit of a joke. They seem to be announced whenever someone feels like it and have been continually dogged by controversies of the oddest kind. You’d think a prize like this would have some dignity, prestige and impact. Hopefully, the new Prime Minister, whoever that might be, might take a serious yet arm’s-length interest in the prize that bears the imprimatur of the highest office in the land.

Mark Rubbo