In 2015, two friends, a Pole and a Slovak, took a gamble and ventured into the overcrowded book market in Slovakia. And as if starting a new publishing house wasn’t risky enough, they chose to focus on literary reportage, a genre that was not well-known in Slovakia at the time. Since then, Absynt has published eighty titles and in late 2017 launched a Czech branch. At this year’s London Book Fair, the founders of Absynt, Filip Ostrowski and Juraj Koudela, shared their remarkable success story with Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood.
Julia Sherwood (JS): Reportage is increasingly being recognized as a bona fide literary genre and gaining popularity around the world. What is it about reportage that attracts you and that distinguishes it from ordinary journalism? Why do you think it resonates with readers?
Filip Ostrowski (FO): There is this general thirst for a deeper understanding of events and their context. We get coverage of the whole world from the media and the internet, but what is missing is a detached view, a kind of more universal commentary. For such a text to emerge, some time has to elapse. We feel that online coverage doesn’t respond to this need, but literary reportage can.
JS: When and how did you first decide to start your own publishing house with a focus on reportage?
FO: We became friends while working for the same company in Kraków and discovered we both loved reading literary reportage. Juraj, who is Slovak (though with Polish roots), was keen to share some of these books with his friends back home but discovered that none of them was available in Slovak bookshops.
Juraj Koudela (JK): The genre simply didn’t exist; the only things on offer were travel books, or books on mountain-climbing.
FO: By then we were both thinking of moving on and starting something new, and seeing as there was a gap in the market, we had the idea of starting a publishing house of our own and doing some market research.
JK: It took over a year from the initial idea to the publication of our first book: we knew it was risky, and to minimise the risk of mistakes we talked to booksellers, publishers, and others in the know. But perhaps the fact that we were amateurs was an advantage: we were willing to take on the risk because we may not have been fully aware of the obstacles that more experienced people would have seen.
JS: How did you come up with the name “Absynt”?
JK: It was the outcome of brainstorming over a long weekend with our families and friends. We were after a name that’s provocative, easy to remember, and has some connections with reportage, as reportage too is often quite edgy.
FO: We also liked the allusion to the drink that was once prohibited because of its hallucinogenic qualities and was particularly favoured by the “damned poets”—our first series is called “Prekliati reportéri”, “Damned Reporters,” so the two go very well together.
JS: You took quite a gamble as newcomers to the market: were you not worried that you might fail?
FO: Well, we knew it was risky, but we both had a business background, knew how to put together a business plan, and figured that we could make a living. What also helped was that publishing a book is quite easy these days, from a purely technical point of view. The challenge is to pick the right book, get it to bookshops, and arouse the reader’s interest, because the market is so saturated at the moment. But we seem to have got it right: our first book came out in March 2015, so we recently celebrated our fourth birthday.
JK: We now have two full-time (the two of us) and three part-time staff, plus a number of regular collaborators—copy editors, translators, and our graphic designer, Pavlína Morháčová, who works for us on a regular basis and has been instrumental in creating our distinctive look. We knew we needed that, as we were entering the market with a new genre that was unknown, with a new brand, and basically all the authors we published were unknown in Slovakia. We were very lucky to have found Pavlína, who created our image—the logo, the book covers, the entire look of both our series.
JS: Could you introduce the books and authors you have published so far and the various series they appeared in?
JK: In our first year, we started with seven books and gradually expanded to thirty last year, including six books under our new Czech imprint. We launched Absynt with the “Damned Reporters” series, featuring work by three Polish authors—Paweł Smoleński’s Oči zasypané pieskom (Eyes Buried in Sand), Wojciech Tochman’s Akoby si kameň jedla (Like Eating a Stone), and Lidia Ostałowska’s Cigán je cigán (A Gypsy Is a Gypsy), followed by the Swedish writer Elisabeth Åsbrink’s A vo Viedenskom lese stále stoja stromy (And in Wienerwald the Trees Are Still Standing).
FO: But we really hit the jackpot with Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, which came out a month after she won the Nobel Prize. By then we had bought the rights to two more of her books—we were incredibly lucky there, and this is a story we’ll be telling our great-grandchildren. For us, as fledgling publishers, the Nobel Prize was a huge boost, a kind of vindication, proof that people who understand literature also see this genre as worthy of being regarded as literature.
JK: We knew Svetlana Alexievich’s writing from Polish translations of her books, and one of our original inspirations was her Polish publisher, Czarne. But in fact, The Unwomanly Face of War had appeared in a Slovak translation before, in an abridged edition in 1980s, based on a censored Soviet version, which is probably why it didn’t really make a mark then.
JS: You mentioned the Polish publisher Czarne, who also initially focused on reportage and has since broadened their range. When and why did you decide to do the same?
FO: This was something we had in mind from early on. We knew that if we wanted to be in it for the long haul, we had to think ahead and couldn’t limit ourselves to a niche that might be bigger or smaller but targets only a single group of people.
JK: It was quite a natural decision, as reportage has its limits—there are several hundred more books we could publish, but the market cannot absorb them all. That’s why we decided to sift them very carefully and pick only what we regarded as the very best of reportage literature. In 2016, we launched our second series, called “100%,” with books that are somewhere between fiction and memoir. The first was Moruša (Morbærtræet/The Mulberry Tree), the memoir of Iboja Wandall-Holm, a Slovak-born Jewish woman, who is now ninety-six and lives in Denmark, where this was hailed as the book of the year in 2001. It is beautifully written and lightly fictionalised. Since then we have published Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s Americanah as well as books by Edouard Louis, Alain Mabanckou, Hisham Matar, Viet Than Nguyen and Liao Yiwu.
JS: Last year you brought out your first original Slovak title. How did that come about?
FO: One of our bestselling titles was The Emperor of America by Martin Pollack, a depiction of the great wave of emigration from Galicia and eastern Slovakia at the end of the nineteenth century (an excerpt has appeared in Asymptote). We saw that this topic resonated because it deals with the history of Slovakia—I guess people like to read about their own country.
JK: But also, publishing original Slovak titles was our intention from the start. Soon after we published our first books, we showed them to the acclaimed Slovak reporter Andrej Bán, who has covered wars and conflicts throughout Europe. We gave him copies of Polish reportage books to show how his colleagues in Poland write and told him we would be open to cooperation if he wanted to write something for us. And the result is Slon na Zemplíne (An Elephant in Zemplín), published in 2018. In February of that year, when Bán was in the middle of writing his book, the murder of the Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová made headlines around the world, shaking confidence in Slovak justice and exposing links between the Mafia and the country’s top officials. So these events quite naturally took centre stage in the book.
FO: We are very happy with the result. The book is highly acclaimed—it won the Tatrabanka literature prize—and Bán is now writing another book for us. We hope there will be more authors from Slovakia.
JS: In addition to the two series you mentioned, you have also launched a Czech branch of Absynt and, most recently, you have acquired Kalligram, an established publishing house. Can you tell us how and why you decided to expand?
FO: As our books were growing in popularity in Slovakia, we also noticed great reaction on Czech social media. People said they envied the Slovaks and wished something like this existed in the Czech Republic, where there are some presses publishing reportage but none that has focused mainly on this genre. So we felt that our approach might work in the Czech Republic, also because the links between the two countries are still very close, at least at the human level: there are many Slovaks living in the Czech Republic, and Slovak authors are always an important presence at all the book festivals and book fairs held there.
JK: Then we were approached by László Szigeti, the founder of Kalligram. He decided to give up publishing after many years and was wondering whether to wind down his business altogether or hand it over to a major house. But when he saw our success in reaching young readers, he thought the Kalligram brand might be less watered down and better looked after by a smaller, more responsive publisher. We didn’t take on his backlist though, just the brand, which we can use for titles of our own choosing, on condition that we continue the tradition of publishing socially minded, humanist literature.
FO: So far we have published nine books under the Kalligram imprint, mostly in a series called “Skica” (Sketch), and mostly commissioned from Slovak authors, all experts in their own field. These books seek to answer some of the serious questions society is grappling with, but are written in accessible language, without technical jargon. The commissioning editor for the series, Juraj Čorba, takes care of that—the idea is to find a voice that sounds like a grandparent, a professor who is not talking to a fellow professor but to his twenty-year-old granddaughter, say, in plain language, and in a very personal way, in the first person. For example, Erik Baláž, a well-known environmental activist, has written a book entitled Stratená voda (Lost Water); the philosopher Miroslav Marcelli has focused on the impact of the internet on our thinking in Myslenie v sieti (Thinking in the Net), and the thinker and biochemist Ladislav Kováč has tackled the meaning of human life (O zmysle ľudského života). The series also includes some translated books, including What is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller, After Europe by Ivan Krastev, and Notes on Suicide by Simon Critchley. Outside of the Skica series, we have published the Slovak translation of Pancreas Diary by the late Péter Esterházy, building on Kalligram’s traditional links with Hungarian literature.
JS: What is your main target group: are these readers of a particular age?
JK: When we were starting out, everyone was telling us: this is madness, nobody in Slovakia reads these days, least of all young people. You might appeal to a small group of intellectuals at most, for a while. But market surveys have shown that the majority of our readers are actually between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and we also see this in the audiences who come to readings and discussions with our authors.
FO: Admittedly, intellectual circles were the first to take notice of us, but we soon became popular with young people. My idea from the start has been of a reader who would be similar to Juraj and me, and our group of friends. So really, our original target group were our friends—mostly urban folk, our generation, and even younger people.
JS: Slovakia is a small country of just five million, and literary fiction rarely sells more than a few hundred copies. How do you go about promoting your books and, if it isn’t a trade secret, can you tell us how many copies you sell on average and what your strongest-selling title is?
JK: Of course, we do the usual marketing and advertising, both of the brand and of individual titles. We organise readings and book tours for our authors and arrange radio and press interviews with them. And we use social media a lot.
FO: I don’t think we would be where we are today without Facebook. It has enabled us to build up and nurture a community. We also use Instagram.
JK: One of the ways in which the industry has changed is that nowadays you don’t have to have large print runs. If we want to supply every bookshop in the country, we start with about two thousand copies to see if the book resonates or not. If there is a great deal of interest, we can reprint a few hundred or thousand copies in a couple of weeks. We now have a steady reader base and can make rough estimates, although this doesn’t invariably work.
FO: There are a number of things to consider: how much we believe in a particular book, what other strong titles there are on the market at the time, whether our cash flow allows us to print fifty thousand books and then do nothing for a few years. Our strategy is fewer copies but more titles.
JK: Of course, we don’t publish Jo Nesbø, whose books sell some hundred thousand copies. Some of our most successful titles have sold over six thousand copies—we scored our greatest success with Mikhail Zygar’s book on Putin, Všetci mocní Kremľa (All the Kremlin’s Men), which sold eight thousand copies.
FO: What matters to us is that a series works as a whole, so it might include some titles that sell phenomenally well and some that don’t, but overall, we don’t have books that sell only a few hundred and others that go over one hundred thousand. It’s more between one thousand and eight thousand.
JS: You are one of a number of small independent presses that have emerged in Slovakia in recent years—others worth mentioning are Inaque, Premedia, BRaK, and Monokel. How are your relations with the other publishers: is there a sense of a community?
JK: The Slovak market is so small that we all know each other personally. So we meet regularly, also informally, not just with the smaller independents but also larger publishers, such as Slovart or Marenčin PT.
FO: We all get on pretty well, even though we are in competition with each other. We avoid the kind of infighting you see among politicians: when one of us scores a success, we may envy each other, but in a good sense. We discuss our problems and support each other through our publishers’ and booksellers’ association. Generally speaking, the market in Slovakia is more friendly and calm compared with, say, Poland, where the environment is rather tough, not to mention the UK.
JS: What next: world domination? Or will you instead consolidate what you have achieved so far? And what books can Slovak readers look forward to next?
FO: This is something we often discuss. We have now reached a kind of ceiling and need to consolidate and maintain what we have before we are ready to take the next leap.
JK: We certainly want to maintain a steady presence in the Slovak market, a brand where the readers will know that if they buy an Absynt book they won’t go far wrong. We want people to have an image of us that is associated with something specific—reportage literature or literary fiction, or extended essays under the Kalligram brand.
FO: Our next title is Frank Westermann’s book Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse Warfare (Čistá biela rasa in Slovak), followed by the cult Vietnam war reportage Dispatches by Michael Herr. After that we’re bringing out our third book by Åsne Seierstadt, The Bookseller of Kabul, which appeared some time ago but has yet to come out in Slovak. Other books in the pipeline are Mikhail Zygar’s The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900-1917 and A Fortune-Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani, Italy’s answer to Kapuściński, which is inspired by his travels in Asia.
Filip Ostrowski (38) graduated in psychology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He is largely responsible for commissioning the Absynt list and marketing.
Juraj Koudela (41) studied Slovak and Polish language and literature at Prešov University and Jagellonian University in Krakow. He deals mainly with Absynt’s finances, book production, and sales.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German and Russian. She is based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
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