About us

Timeline – Our Potted History

2009

Even before the late 2000s recession made the output of the big commercial publishing houses risk-averse (i.e. boring), there weren’t many publishers choosing books solely for literary merit. In 2009 Stefan Tobler, a translator and now And Other Stories’ publisher, met with fellow translators and writers to brainstorm the idea of setting up a collective to publish fresh, contemporary fiction. There was a lot of enthusiasm for his formula that Publishing = Supply + Demand + Magic.

2010

And Other Stories is formed as a social enterprise (our legal form of not-for-profit is a CIC, a community interest company) by Stefan Tobler. It’s been a collaboration from the start. A special kind of crowdfunding that updates an 18th century idea for the 21st century: readers support risky, adventurous writing by subscribing to the books in advance of publication. And people loved it, with the first subscribers signing up in 2010. Sophie Lewis, formerly of Dalkey Archive Press, moved to Rio de Janeiro and edited most of our books from there for a number of years.

2011

And Other Stories is properly born: the first four books are published. The very first one – Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole – became the first translation shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, going on to be one of our most-read books, loved for its black humour and precocious and foul-mouthed child narrator. The other three titles were Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, Iosi Havilio’s Open Door and Clemens Meyer’s All the Lights.

2012

Levy’s Swimming Home made it to the 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlist, relaunching her career. Delighted readers send us presents, including a set of coloured spoons.

2013

We set up office in the US, run initially by Sarah Russo, and started publicising and publishing many of our titles in North America. Meanwhile in the UK, Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods was shortlisted for the 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, almost winning Helen a pig.

2014

Tara Murphy, a veteran of Canadian indie publishing, moved to the UK after she and Stefan got engaged at the end of Book Expo America. (As you do.) Soon Tara Tobler, she became a big part of And Other Stories. The marriage didn’t last, working together has.

2015

Organic, steady growth meant we were finally in a position to move the ‘office’ out of a third-floor flat and into a second-floor small office. We also took on our first full-time member of staff, a translator who turns out to be a brilliant publicist too: Nichola Smalley.

2016

Yuri Herrera won the Best Translated Book Award for his Mexican migration novel Signs Preceding the End of the World. That 2015-published novel, which a larger press had initially bought and then decided was ‘untranslatable’, alongside his The Transmigration of Bodies (published 2016) were hits on both sides of the Atlantic, proving that the reading public does have great, adventurous taste. Signs Preceding the End of the World sold well over 100,000 copies in our editions, making it and Swimming Home our bestsellers.

2017

And Other Stories moved to our main base to Sheffield, because it’s a great rebellious, friendly, affordable city. We rented our first Sheffield office in the Central Library. (Our publicist meanwhile is given a London desk – London is still where the books media is.)

2018

Our Year of Publishing Women – an effort to counteract the inequalities in the publishing industry, not least a frustrating lack of women authors published in English translation. We kicked things off with unpublished and long-lost Ann Quin, The Unmapped Country. Quin-mania ensues.

2019

No major changes for the press, but another good year for prize attention. Amy Arnold’s Slip of a Fish landed a 2019 Goldsmiths Prize shortlisting, while Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Multiple translation prize wins and shortlistings for Gini Alhadeff’s translation of I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, Frank Perry’s of Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by Lina Wolff, Charlotte Whittle’s of People in the Room by Norah Lange, and Stefan Tobler’s of The Old King in His Exile by Arno Geiger.

2020

Emma Warhurst joined the team in February for production work, just a week before a pandemic sent everyone off to work from home. During the early part of the pandemic, we donated a part of our subscriptions revenue to bookshops.

2021

In the year we celebrated our tenth birthday, we were crowned Small Press of the Year for the North of England region at the British Book Awards. Nichola Smalley’s translation of Andrzej Tichýs Wretchedness was awarded the 2021 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, an honour it received after appearing on the International Booker Prize longlist in the spring.

2022

Pandemic or no, we keep on trucking. Many books were long- and shortlisted for a number of major prizes, and won them, including (take a deep breath) Phenotypes by Paulo Scott (and his translator Daniel Hahn) for the International Booker Prize, Keeping the House by Tice Cin (for the Dylan Thomas, Jhalak, Desmond Elliott, British Book Award and Gordon Burns prizes), Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi (for the Jhalak, Desmond Elliott and Republic of Consciousness prizes) and Preti Taneja’s Aftermath (for the Gordon Burn Prize), which it won. Publicist Nichola Smalley leaves for a full-time translation career and Michael Watson steps into her shoes.

2023

Prize attention included a British Book Award shortlisting for Aftermath in the Book of the Year category and the International Booker Prize shortlisting for Eva Baltasar’s Boulder (transl. Julia Sanches), while our first poetry collection, Lutz Seiler’s Pitch & Glint (transl. Stefan Tobler), was the Poetry Book Society’s autumn Translation Choice. In another first for us, And Other Stories won the most prestigious Brazilian literary prize, the Jabuti Prize, which comes in the form of a tortoise statuette, for the best foreign publication of a Brazilian Book (Phenotypes).

From this September our new titles appeared in a new series design in cream card and black foil; the concept is simple and radical: we put words first.

2024

In addition to the prize wins and shortlistings for its Australian edition (including winning the very prestigious Stella and Miles Franklin prizes, making Alexis Wright the only author to have one either prize more than once), Praiseworthy wins the UK’s James Tait Black Prize and is shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Climate Fiction Prize, among others. Marosia Castaldi’s The Hunger of Women wins the ALTA Prize for Prose (for the best translation from any language), Phantom Pain Wings wins the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (the first time a translation has), Mister N wins the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for translations from Arabic, and Traces of Enayat wins the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Meanwhile our very first book, Down the Rabbit Hole, becomes a film, plastered up on billboards and looking great. Gary Perry joins us to head up our social media and bookseller outreach, while Jo Higgs joins in our Sheffield office.

2025

The year our poetry list really establishes itself. We have five poetry titles this year, including a trilogy by American poet Don Mee Choi and translations from Kim Hyesoon’s Korean and Shrikant Verma’s Hindi.

Among the prizes, a few must be highlighted: Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin wins three: the Wingate Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the Hawthornden Prize, while author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi win the International Booker for Heart Lamp, the first time a translator from the Global Majority has won this prize. The 2025 International Booker also longlisted The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (transl. Sinan Antoon). Both books are widely translated into new languages as a result.

2026

September will mark fifteen years of our publishing. Keep an eye on our newsletter for news of our celebrations, although they seem to have started early: in May, And Other Stories wins Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards (the Nibbies), followed a week later by Taiwan Travelogue winning the International Booker Prize, making it two back-to-back Booker wins for And Other Stories.

We publish our first UK poet’s poetry collection, Colin Bramwell’s Fetch.

11 Commandments of Book Selection at And Other Stories

1.

We publish writing that is mind-blowing, often ‘challenging’ (Maureen Freely) and ‘shamelessly literary’ (Stuart Evers) – opening a space for exploration and discovery. Funny often too, at least we think so. Look at the authors we’ve read and published to get a feel for And Other Stories’ tastes.

2.

Our focus has always been on literary fiction, but increasingly on poetry and narrative/literary kinds of non-fiction too. Our first work of literary non-fiction was Now and at the Hour of our Death by Susana Moreira Marques. A funny and wonderful work in verse by Deborah Levy (An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell) has come out too and in 2023 we published our first collection of poetry, Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler, followed by others.

3.

We publish mainly contemporary writing, which for us means written in the last 50 years or so. There are a lot of good writers to catch up with from other literatures. Books can have slow fuses.

4.

We focus on new publications, but don’t rule out great books from the past that never had the reception they deserved, or which fell into neglect. We’re proud to be finding new readers for Ann Quin, Rosalind Belben and James Kelman with our new editions, for instance.

5.

We publish world-class writing, not ‘world writing’. A lot of translations (because there are so many amazing writers currently not available to readers in English) but always alongside English-language writing. We are happy to consider submissions from translators and agents. Hence . . .

6.

Suggestions and tips are encouraged. (Though sometimes we are unable to look at new suggestions. Details on our Submissions page.)

7.

We will read as much as we can but can’t read everything. Reading is fitted in outside of (normal) working hours, so bear with us. Responses to submissions cannot always be quick.

8.

Our reading groups (readers suggesting books written in a foreign language for a group to discuss) kept our lifeblood pumping for our first decade and brought us many great writers, and although we don’t have the bandwidth to run them any more, we continue to love to hear from translators.

9.

As well as being very keen on many authors’ tips about who we should publish, we have a few authors who are contributing editors and bring book suggestions to our acquisitions meetings.

10.

Final decisions are made by the core editorial team – ultimate responsibility and blame rests with the publisher, Stefan Tobler. And Other Stories is a balancing act: a publishing house that must act as the core team deems best, and yet whose direction and choice of titles is guided by a number of people including the writers who are its contributing editors and its active supporters’ intelligent, normally civilised, and always passionate debate.

11.

These aren’t really commandments. Not rules but rules of thumb. There’s always an exception to the rule.

Why not-for-profit

And Other Stories has been set up as a Community Interest Company (CIC, pronounced ‘kick’). This means we are a not-for-private-profit company. In such companies no profits are ever paid out to owners.

But what really gives us a ‘CIC’? (Couldn’t resist!) We make our decisions based on what we think is good writing and a good way of working. This sets us apart from shareholder-driven publishing companies where all decisions are ultimately about increasing profits. Of course, in order to be able to continue our work in the long-term, we certainly can’t lose money. Here’s how we try to do good:

• Slowing climate change and working for a sustainable future for people on this planet is central to our working practices. Read more in our Sustainability Statement.
• We bank with an ethical bank, the Co-operative Bank, that does not invest in sectors such as oil exploration or the arms trade.
• We value and pay translators properly, higher than industry norms. We also put their names on our front covers.
• As a CIC, the company cannot be swallowed (bought) by a larger fish, if that fish’s objectives are commercial. So there’s no danger our aims will suddenly change.
• We do what we can to promote a diverse literary culture, e.g. by supporting fellow independent publishers, bookshops and literary journals.
• We are founding signatories of the Publishing Inclusion Pledge and the climate action pledge Publishing Declares.
• We make a point of looking for and mentoring the best new talent. Of giving people a foot in the door. As well as recruiting staff without previous publishing experience, we have given a number of authors, translators and editors their first books, and on occasion have run competitions and prizes to find translators and authors.

Stefan Tobler

Publisher Stefan Tobler founded And Other Stories out of frustration at the great books not being published in English. Born to an English mother and Swiss father, he lived in northern Brazil, southern England and eastern Germany before making his home in Sheffield. His translations include works by Clarice Lispector, Raduan Nassar, Lutz Seiler and Arno Geiger. He reads in French and Spanish too and obviously he subsidises literary publishing with his fashion empire & Other Stories and his Toblerone chocolate factory.

Tara Tobler

Tara Tobler is a writer, a critic, and the senior fiction editor at And Other Stories. Her acquisitions include works by Banu Mushtaq (winner of the International Booker Prize, as translated by Deepa Bhasthi), Manya Wilkinson, Alexis Wright, Ibtisam Azem, Mona Arshi, Tanya Tagaq, Morgan Talty, Preti Taneja, and Cody Caetano. She lives in the Peak District.

Michael Watson

Michael Watson is our UK publicist, based in London. He joined in 2022. With a distant past working in public history, in his spare time he enjoys searching for lost and forgotten relics in London and elsewhere. He’s also a keen runner and cyclist.

Jo Higgs

Jo is And Other Stories’ Editorial Production Executive, based in Sheffield. He moved down to the Steel City last year, from Edinburgh, where he had lived his whole life until then, including studying his MA and MScR at the University of Edinburgh, looking at contemporary(ish) Scottish literature. Since school, he has worked in coffee while freelance writing on the side, covering arts, literature, football and music. He also writes a story every now and then.

Gary Michael Perry

Based in Hackney, East London, Gary handles our marketing and liaises with bookshops. Originally from the Sussex coast, he spent an epic thirteen years at Foyles Bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road, where he led the Fiction Department and advocated for translated fiction and LGBTQ+ writing. A passionate reader of literature in Portuguese, you can usually find him with a pastel de nata close to hand.

Luciane Tobler

Luciane is our part-time book-keeper. She has worked in accounts departments for a number of companies. She moved to the UK from Recife, Brazil, in 2020. She lives in the Midlands.
 

Contributing Editors

Tice Cin

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from north London. She has an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture from UCL. Tice has acted and performed at venues such as Battersea Arts Centre and Barbican’s Pit Theatre, and has been commissioned by organisations like St. Paul’s Cathedral and Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was named one of Complex Magazine’s best music journalists of 2021, and has written for places such as DJ Mag and Mixmag. A DJ and music producer, she created an accompanying album for Keeping the House with a host of talented features. Keeping the House was named one of Guardian’s Best Books of 2021, and has been featured widely including in The New York Times and the Washington Post.  A filmmaker, she is currently writing and co-directing three short films.

Briallen Hopper

Briallen Hopper is a writer and editor living in Queens, New York City. Her first book, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury), was a Kirkus Best Memoir of the Year, a CBC Best International Nonfiction Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her next book, Gilead Reread, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Briallen edits at KtB (Killing the Buddha), an online magazine of religion, culture, and politics, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York, and in the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

Preti Taneja

As a Contributing Editor, Preti Taneja advises us and is involved in our acquisitions process, for which she accepts full manuscripts. Her debut novel We That Are Young won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize and was also nominated for international awards including the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Jan Michalski Prize and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award. It was a Book of the Decade in The Hindu, a top 10 Book of the Year in The Sunday Times, a Top 10 Literary Fiction Book of the Year in Library Journal, and a Book of the Year in The Guardian and The Spectator. It is in translation around the world. Preti broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and 4 on world literature and culture; she also teaches writing in prisons and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.

Advisory Board Members

All our staff and contributing editors are welcome to participate in advisory board meetings. They are joined by:

Michael Barron

From the mail rooms of New Directions, Michael Barron worked his way up to editor, a role he also held at Melville House. He is a recipient of the Axion Foundation / E.L Doctorow Fiction Fellowship at NYU where he taught a class on global literature. His endeavours include assembling a complete English-language online anthology of short stories from every country and region in the world, being a jurist for the National Book Critics Circle award for best translation, and editing the books section of The Rumpus. He has translated literature from the Spanish, reviews for the Washington Post, and is at work on a novel. You can follow Michael on twitter.

Marta Berto

Poetry admirer and book gatherer, Marta moved to Sheffield from Warsaw. She’s currently the Screen Heritage Fund Manager at the British Film Institute, where she supports screen heritage development and moving image archives across the UK. She has in-depth knowledge of development, production and exhibition of the arts, having worked for the European Commission’s MEDIA/ Creative Europe programme and having held a variety of senior roles in the creative industries.

Debjani Biswas-Hawkes

Debjani Biswas-Hawkes currently works in placemaking, with a particular interest in creating inclusive spaces in the public realm. Her practice is informed by a feminist approach and through co-production with diverse communities. A qualified solicitor, Debjani comes to And Other Stories with experience from both the City and the pro bono sector. Throughout, she advocated for marginalised and disadvantaged groups, volunteering with Refugee Action, the International Centre for Advocates Against Discrimination and Young Women’s Trust, amongst others. Her other great passion is reading, underpinned by a BA in English Literature and Language. Having reviewed And Other Stories’ early titles, Debjani has enjoyed watching the publisher grow in recognition and success, and is proud to be a part of its advisory board.

Michelle Chan Schmidt

Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) occasionally writes and/or translates, but her most colourful and current caps are that of Assistant Editor for Fiction at Asymptote; 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop; Scholar of English Literature and History at Trinity College, Dublin; and bookseller/tea-drinker at Marrowbone Books, a lovely yellow second-hand bookshop in Dublin’s Liberties. Her creative and critical writing about Hong Kong has been published in La Piccioletta Barca, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, Asymptote, and other venues. She updates on her writing and editorial work here.

Humairaa Dudhwala

Humairaa Dudhwala is an Assistant Editor at Manchester University Press, working across the Politics and History lists and commissioning in Middle Eastern Studies. She has a background in book production and is involved with social responsibility work at the Press. In 2024 Humairaa received the London Book Fair’s Trailblazer Award. She is currently studying for her MA at SOAS.

Seb Emina

Seb Emina is an award-winning editor and writer based in Paris. For a decade he was editor-in-chief of The Happy Reader magazine, from its launch until its final issue in 2023; other previous roles include deputy editor at the style and culture magazine Fantastic Man and producer at the arts organisation Artangel. His writing has appeared in newspapers and magazines internationally. He’s the author of The Breakfast Bible, a breakfasters’ compendium. With Silvia Guerra he is co-curator of Five Radio Stations, a series of artworks that are also radio stations. His fortnightly (ish) newsletter is called READ ME.

Mireille Harper

Mireille Harper is an editorial director at Bluebird & One Boat (Pan Macmillan). Mireille is also a writer, sensitivity reader and PR/communications consultant. Her work has been published in British Vogue, GUAP, Nataal and more. As a communications consultant specialising in creative, cultural and community-led projects, Mireille has worked with Punch Records, BYP Network, ShoutOut Network. She is a trustee of Migrateful and on the advisory board for Africa Writes. Mireille is the author of Timelines from Black History and a contributing writer to Timelines of Everyone, The Black History Book and Migrations. Her essay, ‘Why Passivity Will No Longer Do’ is published in the And Other Stories / Feminist Book Society anthology, This Is How We Come Back Stronger.

Gloria Lin

Gloria Lin is an applied research consultant specialising in philanthropy and greenfield technology in the commercial and arts sectors. She was the inaugural Research Manager at the National Gallery UK, supporting public access, impact, and major acquisitions. Her previous roles include research management at the London Business School and Imperial College. Her consultancy work covers a range of public sector, listed companies and startups across the US, UK, EU, and East Asia. Gloria also served as the First Decade Curator for the Crafts Council UK, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Gloria holds a Joint BA in East Asian Studies and Asian Pacific Studies from the University of Leeds and was shortlisted for the Helen Scott Lidgett Prize in 2014. She is also a poet connected to the Berlin-based experimental publisher, Tabloid Press.

Hope Ndaba

Hope Ndaba (they/she) is a Communications Manager at FMcM, the books PR agency, where they work on prizes and across a list of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Kathryn Hughes, Helen Russell, Kirsty Sedgman and others. Prior to their current role, Hope worked at Picador Books, Vintage Books and Profile/Serpent’s Tail on literary fiction and narrative non-fiction titles. Their work in publicity has been shortlisted for an Annual PPC Award and Hope really enjoys being involved in the industry; whether it’s through mentoring, chairing or attending literary events, keeping up with prizes or tending to their own bookstagram. Their poetry has recently been published in the collection, He, She, They, Us (May 2024). Hope is based in London.

Steven Norton

Steven Norton is co-head of executive networks, research, and media at Metis Strategy, a management consulting firm that advises Fortune 500 technology executives. He previously was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he wrote about business and technology (and occasionally literature in translation). Prior to joining WSJ, he helped launch an online community for financial professionals at Thomson Reuters. Steven holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is based in Brooklyn.

Sade Omeje

Sade Omeje is a literary fiction editor at The Novelry, and has been a freelance book editor since 2022. Following on from an editorial career at Harper Collins under the 4th Estate and William Collins imprints, Sade explored the world of start-ups, before circling back to her love of books and starting her own literary consultancy. Originally from Manchester, she is the trustee of the Portico Library and a recipient of the Future Female Leaders Award from IESE Business School. Outside of work, she likes to travel and write. She is based in London.

Jonathan Paterson

Jonathan Paterson began his trip down from the North East of England by way of Salford University studying Sociology and Cultural Studies and lived in Manchester for many years working in the finance department of the world-famous Lowry Centre art galleries and theatre. He began his publishing career in London at Transworld but now he is Commercial Director at Hachette UK’s Octopus Publishing Group. He lives in Manchester and London.

Nadia Saeed

Nadia is Translation and International Officer at human rights and literature charity English PEN. She administers its various translation grants and co-edits PEN Transmissions, an international magazine for writers, where she hopes to celebrate young voices from diaspora communities across the UK. She is based in Yorkshire and credits her previous work in publishing and theatre for her passion for bringing people together through writing and storytelling. She received the Diana Award for active campaigner for her work with the Leeds Youth Council, and is a 2024 UK Creative Community Fellow.

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt is a founder and the editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Ltd (Manchester) and the General Editor of the magazine PN Review. He is a literary historian, poet and quondam novelist, and he is currently a Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester.

Sophie Tolhurst

Sophie Tolhurst is a Sheffield-based design writer and editor, whose writing features in publications such as Creative Review, Frieze, and the Financial Times, as well as forthcoming title, The Design Book, part of the DK Big Ideas Simply Explained series. Following a pivot from design to journalism, Sophie has since had the privilege of writing about a wide range of design and the issues it intersects, from Right to Repair to inclusivity in design briefs. Outside of work she can usually be found exploring new landscapes – whether in the pages of a book or out on her bike.

William Weightman

William Weightman is a Director at Swiss Life Asset Managers. He has prior experience in the music industry, where he oversaw the day-to-day running of a record label and artist management division at Chugg Entertainment, one of Australia’s leading entertainment companies. William is a regular guest lecturer on International Business Strategy and holds an Executive MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM). He is based in London.

Sustainability Statement

And Other Stories’ Action for the Climate

1. Carbon-cutting (incl. No-Fly Policy)
2. Advocacy and Collaboration
3. Eco-friendly Production and Business
4. Donating to an Environmental Organisation

1. Carbon-cutting (incl. No-Fly Policy)

If we want to slow climate change, we have to change our actions as people and companies. Air travel is one of the most significant contributors to carbon emissions and is a major area where we as a press can curb emissions.

With the aim of continually reducing carbon emissions:

• We don’t normally organise, encourage or fund author tours involving flights, but instead we lobby for behavioural change across the sector, including for literature event promoters to provide non-flight alternatives (see ‘Advocacy and Collaboration’, below). Naturally, we respect authors’ and translators’ personal choices about travel and they make their own travel decisions.
• The main exceptions that prove the rule: we will occasionally use air travel, most commonly for reasons of geographical equity for an author or translator who is located beyond a two-day journey by land or sea of the tour destination; flights may also be used for an author with serious health issues or disability.
• We measure and monitor our flight travel carbon emissions each year and compare against pre-pandemic levels.
• We always consider digital and hybrid options for events, especially a) to cut the carbon footprint and b) to make artists’ work, talks and performances widely accessible (including outside major urban centres).
• We remember the need for equitable exchange (Global North / Global South – urban / rural), and we look to create opportunities for those at the edges.
• We help staff to make carbon-cutting life choices by providing extra days of leave through the Sustainable Travel Leave scheme for each year they don’t use flights for personal travel. This allows them extra time to travel by slower means. We recognise that some staff can go no-fly in their personal lives more easily than others, and are open to introducing further incentives for carbon-cutting life choices.

2. Advocacy and Collaboration

As a publisher, we use our public platform to advocate. We publish books that deal with the climate emergency, such as Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, which gives a Caribbean perspective on the climate emergency.

We advocate for behavioural change in our sector and for the sharing of knowledge of how we are all changing. It’s important to explore the positives of the new ways of working, which – beyond carbon reductions – include a widening of access for all via more virtual options and the way that slower travel by public transport gives people more time to switch off and read.

We communicate to our partners that we want virtual meeting opportunities to continue (e.g. in hybrid sales conferences). We ask prizes, festivals and foreign cultural institutions to offer no-fly ways to promote books. We ask printers and paper mills to reduce their impact, for example by using renewable energy. We have been an active member of the Publishers Association’s Sustainability Taskforce since its foundation and have been involved in developing tools for the publishing community to measure its environmental impact, as well as in drafting the Publishing Declares pledge:

Publishing Declares

We, the undersigned, pledge to:

1. Join the global climate effort to limit warming to 1.5°C by setting ambitious, measurable targets across our own operations and extended supply chain to achieve net zero as soon as possible and by 2050 at the latest.
2. Protect nature and biodiversity, working with supply chain partners that are resource efficient, use sustainable materials and processes wherever possible in the content we produce, and constantly innovating to make use of new and recycled materials.
3. Collaborate with our peers, authors, illustrators, supply chain partners, and business partners to translate our climate aspirations and commitments into tangible actions to safeguard our planet for future generations.
4. Empower our colleagues to become climate literate and support them to bring that knowledge into the work that they do.
5. Use our expertise, platform, and voice to raise awareness and drive positive climate action wherever we can.

3. Eco-friendly Production and Business

We use environmental, low-carbon printers, where production is respectful of human and animal rights. Our books are printed on acid-free, long-lasting papers obtained from sustainable, Forestry Stewardship Council–certified sources, where the wood is harvested responsibly. They are printed with soy and vegetable oil–based inks, and we avoid the use of laminates (plastic) on the books’ covers. Through the Publishers Association’s new tools (tools commissioned in 2021 for development, see ‘Advocacy’ section above), we will be able to investigate our supply chain more closely.

In addition, And Other Stories (and our partners) have stopped using plastics in packaging and aim to work with partners who are eco-friendly and ethical. For example, we bank with an ethical bank that does not invest in or loan money to businesses in the fossil fuel industry or other environmentally negative industries.

Postscript: Readers may notice that we are not planning to purchase any carbon offsets. This is because they are ineffective. For more on this, please see this Greenpeace article or this Pro Publica article.

Equal Opportunities Policy

Inequality and discrimination exist against people due to age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership status, ethnicity (race), religion or belief, gender (sex), and sexual orientation. These are the protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010. We also recognise inequality and discrimination exists based on a person’s socio-economic and geographic background. And Other Stories commits to make sure it is open and accessible; that there is equality of employment; to prevent harassment, and make sure everyone is treated equally and with respect; and to ensure any complaints we receive about discrimination or harassment are taken seriously. We have an Equality Action Plan which we discuss and revise regularly. Its actions include our current commitment regarding workforce and artistic work (see below).

Authors Come First

It is important to us that our press is welcoming, safe, and supportive. We wish to make clear that abusive behaviour of any kind will not be tolerated, and in our relations with media we continually advocate for coverage that is respectful, accurate, and work-focussed. Our authors’ comfort and mental well-being are paramount; we have in the past pulled out of significant media coverage because the author felt that boundaries we had set beforehand were violated, or when the author otherwise felt bias creating an unsafe or confrontational space. We want all our authors and others who work with us to feel comfortable coming to us with concerns of any kind.

Equity & Justice working group

We are currently thinking a lot about anti-racism and how to better serve communities with protected characteristics, including disability, and are discussing what we need to be doing better. We have set up an Equity & Justice working group with board and staff members for internal work. One thing out in public is our editor Tara Tobler’s opinion piece on anti-racism in The Bookseller (the UK’s trade magazine for publishing). In the article, she talks about the need for more anti-racism work and advocacy from the white publishing sector.

Workforce

Our focus is to have recruitment practices that work to correct the representation biases in the industry, and to maintain a working culture that is safe and supportive to people of all backgrounds. With our main office in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, we are happy to be providing publishing work in a region where there are less opportunities in the sector.

Acquisitions

In total from the year 2025 onwards, And Other Stories has an internal commitment to publish 50% writers from the Global Majority, as well as continuing to support work from the LGBTQ2S+ community, writers from the North of England, and working-class writers. We aim to continually interrogate and refine our acquisitions process, with the goals of looking more widely for the great books that are out there and of minimising bias and challenging it when it is found.

Year of Publishing Women 2018 & Gender Parity Pledge

Kamila Shamsie gave a talk that lit a fuse by talking about the fact that books by and about women are still significantly less likely to win literary prizes or to receive as much recognition as their male counterparts. She therefore challenged publishers to have a Year of Publishing Women in 2018. We were the only publisher who took up the challenge.

We remain committed to gender parity, and because we are one of the major publishers of literary fiction in translation, by focusing on this we hope to encourage real change in the industry in this area.

Open Publishing

We see the actions we commit to as a continuation of our ongoing project to open up publishing, which started with our brainstorming events before we launched (about what kind of a publisher people wanted), our subscriber supporter base and (in our first decade) our reading groups for discussing foreign language books we could publish. For transparency, we also have a large advisory board and our quarterly board meetings are open to and well attended by all our staff too. Let us know what else you’d like to see us and other publishers doing!