Two Montreal companies—English-language publisher Baraka Books and French-language publisher Éditions de l’Homme—are launching new imprints to showcase Quebec’s writers in translation for the English-language market.
Robin Philpot, president and publisher at Baraka Books, says the new imprint QC Fiction will focus on Quebec-based writers in their 20s to 40s and publish about four translated titles per year. Headed by the literary translator Peter McCambridge, who hails from Ireland but moved to Quebec a decade ago, the imprint is scheduled to launch in March 2016 with a book from Éric Dupont.
“We realized that Quebec has a big book culture, and we have a large number of young fiction writers who are in their 20s to 40s whose books do not come out in English,” Philpot says. “Éric Dupont’s works are consistently bestsellers, yet Bestiaire—whose English title will be Life in the Royal Court of Matane—will be his first to appear in English.”
Meanwhile, French-language publisher Éditions de l’Homme will be getting into the translation game with its new imprint Juniper Publishing. Since it falls under the umbrella of Quebecor, the largest book publisher in Quebec, the Juniper imprint aims to publish an impressive 20–25 mostly nonfiction titles each year.
“Most of the time, we will try to publish them simultaneously in French and English, which will be a great innovation and opportunity for us,” Éditions de l’Homme v-p Pierre Bourdon says.
Of those annual titles, 10–12 are expected to come from Quebecor-owned consumer magazines such as Canadian Living and the Hockey News, while another 10–15 will be translations of Éditions de l’Homme’s French titles.
