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To everyone she is known as the one who spotted R K Rowling and gifted Harry Potter to a world so starved of wonderment. But publishing wizard Liz Calder, who was recently in India as part of a British Council programme, is much more than the face behind Potter-mania, finds Sujoy Dhar after a tête-à-tête.
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Very few Harry Potter readers in India actually are familiar with Liz Calder. Few bibliophiles bother to find out more than the writer of the international bestsellers. So the visit of Liz Calder to India recently for a British Council talent hunt contest generated interests about the publishing wizard who gifted the world one of the most magical names in modern children literature- Harry Potter.
At 67, the shimmering publishing director of Bloomsbury says the next great writer to equal J K Rowling's success can well be found in India .
"Another Rowling may be sitting in some cafe in College Street (in north Kolkata)," says Calder who picked up J.K. Rowling after the first 'Harry Potter' manuscript met with rejection in other places.
"The last and the seventh 'Harry Potter' book from Rowling would hit the bookstores in 2007 because that was what Rowling had said from the beginning. Now I want new writers to cast a spell on readers and I do not rule out an Indian emerging successfully on the international scene," says Liz who lived over her family's grocery in Edgware (the UK ) until she was 11, when years of globe-trotting began. Her family emigrated to New Zealand and she lived and studied there for years.
She later became a successful fashion model in Brazil before returning to England and getting into publishing, in the process becoming the co-founder of Bloomsbury which eventually met with what fellow publisher Philip Gwyn-Jones calls the "greatest slice of luck to hit any publisher in the last 100 years".
"We can publish any writer irrespective of the place where they come from. Indian writing is extremely good. People do send their work to us from India . Who can say that the next Rowling is not sitting now in some cafe in College Street of Kolkata," she says after a visit with her husband Louis Baum to the congested book bazaar of College Street in north Kolkata, the academic hub of the city.
"We have published a few Indian writers recently. They are all original manuscripts,' says Liz, whose house first published Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker prize winner ' Midnight 's Children'.
"Some 20 years ago there might have been a little bit of insularity in England , people were wary about taking books from other countries. But with the success of ' Midnight 's Children', this changed. People are keen to find talent here ( India )," she says.
"I like Vikram Seth, Manil Suri, Amitav Ghosh. I like Arundhati Roy who I think wrote a wonderful book ('The God of Small Things')," she says, exhorting emerging Indian writers in English to emulate internationally.
"Obviously, it is easier for us to assess if a book from India is written in English. It by and large has to be in English. We cannot assess a book written in other languages like Hindi,' she says.
Having spent many years in Brazil , her love for a similar country like India and variety in writing is only natural. Liz's love affair with Brazil began in the 1960s, when she worked as a fashion model and journalist in São Paolo.
"I felt this was where I belonged. The heat envelopes you; [and then there are] the smells, the tropical vegetation, the gashes of red earth, and the racial mix which I find appealing," she says in an interview with The Observer.
However, she spent the ensuing decades in London with an Amazonian parrot, Juju, as a voluble memento, while not forgetting her Portuguese. In 2003 she co-founded South America 's first literary festival, in the Brazilian resort and fishing town of Parati . Despite its remote location, midway between Rio and São Paolo, the Parati International Festival of Literature (Flip) draws huge crowd. She also received an Order of Merit for services to culture from the President of Brazil.
Liz married for the first time in 1958 to fellow student Richard Calder, son of New Zealand 's Air Vice Marshall, but the marriage ended in 1972. She has a daughter and a son from the marriage. In 2000 she married her long time companion Louis Baum.
Liz had romantic fairy tale ideas of love and marriage and trailed her husband wherever he went till she read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), and felt a "great wave of relief to discover that what I was feeling was being felt by millions of women." "It changed my life."
While her financial independence began with the separation with husband in 1969 (her career as a model earlier in Brazil apart), it was obviously her association with Rowling that brought her publishing house Bloomsbury to international limelight.
Liz says her association with Rowling began rather routinely. "Just the usual way, an agent sent the manuscript which was turned down by some other houses. The children's editors, they loved it and we published it. No, nobody imagined that it would be such a big success," she says.
Potter fans now know that Rowling would write only one more book in the series and no more. "One more 'Harry Potter' only but she (Rowling) said from the beginning that she would write seven. But Rowling would write other books for us," says Liz.
But what was the magic behind Potter-mania?
"The success of 'Harry Potter' was through word of mouth. I think it was also the time when children perhaps realised that reading a book can be exciting or more exciting than watching television."
"Rowling filled a very important blank space at the right time and with lots of freshness and originality. She wrote something that could tear an entire generation away from the TV. It had the right blend of magic, a school story, good versus evil and humour."
But how does Liz strike a balance between content and money? Some of Bloomsbury 's critics say "the more money Bloomsbury has made, the less adventurous its editorial choices have become, with a growing obsession with 'big' books".
"Actually the job of a publisher is a tough one as it calls for balancing between aesthetics and balance sheets," she explains.
"The editors consult with the marketing and sales people and everybody contributes in the evaluation of the book. We depend on the instincts of the editors,' she says.
Opines author and friend Salman Rushdie, "You can't say there's a 'school' of Liz Calder. She has a fondness for writing that's unusual or adventurous, but she's completely instinctive; she trusts her nose."
But is not afraid of possible disgrace and legal trouble from new writers in the wake of Kaavya Viswanathan episode.
"We have always published writers who we thought were original writers. The books that have been successful are ones which people got excited about," says Calder ruling out any unsavoury episode in her publishing house like the one generated by Kaavya Viswanathan book 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life'.
"To publish something just because something is successful, like may be 'Bridget Jones's Diary' is not wise. The only way to publish successfully is to go ahead with what you believe in," says
Liz whose judgment has made her a key figure in momentous changes in British publishing since the early 1970s, reflecting feminism and the internationalisation of literary fiction.
As fellow publisher and friend Carmen Callil says in an interview: "She is probably the most magnificent of the generation of women who changed things; who moved the centre of the universe, of vision, and gave it a jolt."
But despite every other achievement of Liz it is Harry Potter that made her so famous. As Rushdie sums up, "I am grateful to Harry Potter for taking care of Liz."
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