thank you jonathan, and thank you very much to free word who allowed me to be here for this. and thank you enormously to english pen and to their literature committee who laid a generous hand on saviano’s book. it really does make an enormous difference it makes an enormous difference to him
MacLehose Trail , that the book is supported in this way by english pen i’m thinking that over a very long life in publishing i was thinking who remotely like roberto saviano have i published? it was my great good fortune to look after solzhenitsyn’s work for a long time.
and also we published lech walesa’s autobiographies and i thought afterwards that these two men between them changed the second half of the twentieth century as almost no other two writers. saviano doesn’t have the support and solidarity. he doesn’t have a network which is national and visible and vocal and powerful that supported him he doesn’t, in any regard, look remotely like solzhenitsyn as a human being. the strange thing about this giant of a man with the courage of six lions
is that he’s tiny, and fragile, and very soft-spoken and is also in my view a very fine writer the situation in which he finds himself is one that he could have perfectly easily avoided. but he didn’t, and even after he is caged in the way that he is, he goes on writing and this book, essays that appear in newspapers essays that appear in this book range of his reading is one of the things that when you go through this book
i think you’ll be enormously impressed by it one of the pieces in the book deals with the work and the fate of anna politkovskaya and you can’t help thinking that here we are in the twenty-first century already two enormously courageous people who set themselves, as individuals, against in one case the russian state and in the other case, the ‘understate’ in italy and what i feel very strongly is that we as publishers should do everything that we can we should bear in mind this book has been already very successfully published throughout europe.
it sold i something in the order of 200,000 copies in relatively tiny sweden and we should remember that and when we say to ourselves that roberto saviano doesn’t have a network like 'solidarity', we have to say to ourselves that we can do that for him, that we owe it to a man of his courage owe it to the civilisation that we are comfortable within we owe it to our own administration to remind them over and over again that to not allow roberto saviano to come here
to talk as he was going to when we initially thought that it might be possible to get him here with misha glenny in public, in front of this huge audience as we anticipated in spain - as the book also describes he had a public meeting with salman rushdie which was an enormous success i look forward to a time when roberto saviano will not only be allowed to walk the streets of england free, even scotland but i want him to be free all over europe i don’t want this man to have to hide i want him, in addition, to be able to play an active part in
italian post-berlusconi politics so, you smiled! smiled no doubt because you didn’t think there would ever be such a moment… we wouldn’t be able to be at this launch today without the swift and scholarly help that we had from federico varese and paulo campana who set a great deal of their own work aside to help us over the last hurdle which included dealing with the libel problems that we live with in this country we are very grateful to oonagh stransky the translator
who came all the way here from italy for this event and just back to the pen committee for a moment for having, particularly in the person of their then chairman julian evans having gone on and on and on about the merit of this book and the need to make it exactly right even i dare say, to improve on the impeccable copy of the original italian publisher so i’m very grateful to introduce misha glenny
thank you jonathan, and thank you very much to free word who allowed me to be here for this. and thank you enormously to english pen and to their literature committee who laid a generous hand on saviano’s book. it really does make an enormous difference it makes an enormous difference to him
MacLehose Trail , that the book is supported in this way by english pen i’m thinking that over a very long life in publishing i was thinking who remotely like roberto saviano have i published? it was my great good fortune to look after solzhenitsyn’s work for a long time.
and also we published lech walesa’s autobiographies and i thought afterwards that these two men between them changed the second half of the twentieth century as almost no other two writers. saviano doesn’t have the support and solidarity. he doesn’t have a network which is national and visible and vocal and powerful that supported him he doesn’t, in any regard, look remotely like solzhenitsyn as a human being. the strange thing about this giant of a man with the courage of six lions
is that he’s tiny, and fragile, and very soft-spoken and is also in my view a very fine writer the situation in which he finds himself is one that he could have perfectly easily avoided. but he didn’t, and even after he is caged in the way that he is, he goes on writing and this book, essays that appear in newspapers essays that appear in this book range of his reading is one of the things that when you go through this book
i think you’ll be enormously impressed by it one of the pieces in the book deals with the work and the fate of anna politkovskaya and you can’t help thinking that here we are in the twenty-first century already two enormously courageous people who set themselves, as individuals, against in one case the russian state and in the other case, the ‘understate’ in italy and what i feel very strongly is that we as publishers should do everything that we can we should bear in mind this book has been already very successfully published throughout europe.
it sold i something in the order of 200,000 copies in relatively tiny sweden and we should remember that and when we say to ourselves that roberto saviano doesn’t have a network like 'solidarity', we have to say to ourselves that we can do that for him, that we owe it to a man of his courage owe it to the civilisation that we are comfortable within we owe it to our own administration to remind them over and over again that to not allow roberto saviano to come here
to talk as he was going to when we initially thought that it might be possible to get him here with misha glenny in public, in front of this huge audience as we anticipated in spain - as the book also describes he had a public meeting with salman rushdie which was an enormous success i look forward to a time when roberto saviano will not only be allowed to walk the streets of england free, even scotland but i want him to be free all over europe i don’t want this man to have to hide i want him, in addition, to be able to play an active part in
italian post-berlusconi politics so, you smiled! smiled no doubt because you didn’t think there would ever be such a moment… we wouldn’t be able to be at this launch today without the swift and scholarly help that we had from federico varese and paulo campana who set a great deal of their own work aside to help us over the last hurdle which included dealing with the libel problems that we live with in this country we are very grateful to oonagh stransky the translator
who came all the way here from italy for this event and just back to the pen committee for a moment for having, particularly in the person of their then chairman julian evans having gone on and on and on about the merit of this book and the need to make it exactly right even i dare say, to improve on the impeccable copy of the original italian publisher so i’m very grateful to introduce misha glenny