Umberto Eco flew to London specifically to present the sixth annual LBF Lifetime Achievement Award in International Publishing to his old friend Drenka Willen, senior editor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The Award, voted for by the Fair’s Advisory Board, lauded Serbian-born Willen's "outstanding life-long contribution to the international book world through her exceptional judgment, taste and passion in introducing foreign literature not only to an American audience but to an English-speaking audience at large."
In front of an audience that included last year's honoree, Peter Mayer, Harvill Secker's Geoff Mulligan, who shares many authors with Willen, and his predecessor at Harvill, Christopher MacLehose, Eco paid tribute to a woman who is "a great publisher because she is a great editor". He recalled how, when the translator had called for a hundred pages to be cut from the manuscript of The Name of the Rose, the unlikely bestseller that began his relationship with Willen, she had advised him to "pretend to cut some" by trimming "a word here, a passage there" to give the illusion of cutting. In the end, he cut maybe 25 pages, and appreciated Willen's "complicity".
In her acceptance speech, Willen said that while the last 40 years had its share of “fears, mistakes, errors of judgment, lack of courage, narrow gutters, appalling jackets, bad PNLs,” as well bringing authors to the U.S. “to give readings attended exclusively by Harcourt staff and other homeless people,” she prefers to remember the achievements of Helen and Kurt Wolff Books and its predecessor institutions.
By the time Willen took over the day-to-day responsibilities of the imprint in 1981, the Wolffs had already introduced scores of international authors to American readers, Willen said. And the history of the list, she added, goes back to Kurt Wolff in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Upon taking over, Willen recalled finding a novel on her desk about a medieval monastery by an Italian professor from Bologna. “Little did I know then that The Name of the Rose, in an elegant English translation by William Weaver, would become a bestseller in the U.S.,” said Willen.
Looking out at the many authors in the crowd, Willen observed that “ownerships have changed in the last hundred years as have publishers, natural and man-made disasters have been suffered, but great books by great authors are here to stay.”
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