Under the volcano

As the dust settles – literally – on the 2010 London International Book Fair, agents and publishers are weighing up the damage in terms of cancelled meetings and lost opportunities as flight restrictions prevented many foreign visitors from reaching Earls Court. Normally the major publishing event of the year, at which deals are done, international rights are negotiated and titles are pitched by agents, it was eerily quiet when I attended this week.

A letter from the fair’s organisers, distributed on the final day, estimated that overall attendance was down by a third. One agent told me: “70 per cent of my meetings have been cancelled, and I’ve heard that story all over. Only the French and Dutch, and those who got here early, made it."

Among those who did attend, however, there was a heightened sense of camaraderie, not to mention opportunities for smaller players who might otherwise have struggled to get a look in. "We few, we happy few,” as one visitor remarked at an eve-of-fair party. A lot of people, I am told, spent the greater part of the day drinking in the bar.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the South African delegation, the subject of this year’s Market Focus. They and the fair’s organisers had been planning this for the past 12 months, and in the event many participants were unable to attend. The main speaker, the businesswoman and anti-apartheid activist Mamphela Ramphele, was marooned in South Africa, while the High Commissioner, Zola Skweyiya, stood in for the absent Minister of Culture. Fortunately André Brink, Tuesday’s Author of the Day, was already in Europe when the volcano erupted, and drew a large crowd at the Pen Literary Café.

Not everyone had a disappointing fair however, and the announcement of the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist at a breakfast event on Tuesday was a great moment for independent publishers, who took four of the six places on the list. Congratulations, then, to Richmond-based Alma Books for publishing Rosie Alison's debut, The Very Thought of You,  about an eight-year-old evacuee sent to a Yorkshire estate during the Second World War, and to Serpent’s Tail for the Texan author Attica Locke's brilliant debut thriller Black Water Rising. 

Faber has two novels on the list, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. They will be battling it out with Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) and the Anglo-Trinidadian novelist Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster) for the £30,000 prize, which will be announced on 9 June.
 

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